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IRELAND'S 
CASE FOR FREEDOM 



Written in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, 
in tKe Summer of iqi8 

By 

LAURENCE GINNELL 

Barrister-at-Lav? 

Formerly Representative of Westmeath in the BritisK Parliament 
Now Representative of WestmeatK in Dail Eireann 



Copyrighted by the Authc 
Price Fifty Cents 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BUREAU 

163 WEST WASHINGTON STREET 
CHICAGO. ILLINOIS 



Copyri^bted 1921 

ty 

Laurence Gmnell 



A617259 



i^'f. 



(.1- 



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Ireland's Case for Freedom 



SYNOPSIS 



The ancient sovereign State of Ireland, one of the primary 
sovereign States of Christendom, claims resumption of her 
sovereign independence, recognition of her status by the Inter- 
national Peace Congress, and intervention on her behalf by way 
of international guarantee of future respect for her independence • 
and submits m support of her claim the subjoined fourteen Propo- 
sitions, prefaced by a brief Synopsis of them, respectively : 

I. The Irish Nation earnestly desires the International Peace 
Congress to be pure and impartial in its constitution and proceed- 
ings, beyond the reach of the power and contamination of States 
guilty of entering into secret treaties in conflict with their public 
professions and with the rights and interests of peoples subject to 
them and of peoples subject to other States; beyond the reach of 
all influences save those of authentic history and justice; in order 
that it may inspire confidence in all nations, small as well as great 
to be affected by its decisions ; and that those decisions may be of 
a character fitting for the beginning of a new era of amity among 

, nations and peaceful progress throughout the world. 

II. Ireland is historically entitled to independence as one of 
the primary sovereign States of Christendom, never having for- 
teited or lost her sovereign status or consciously recognized 
sovereignty over her in any other country; always having so re- 
sented and resisted the usurpation of foreign military force that the 
contmual presence of an army of occupation has always been, and 
still is, essential to the maintenance of foreign rule; having always 
venerated, and still venerating as her truest patriots the purest and 
best of her sons who. treated by England as criminals, have gen- 
eration after generation, ofifered their lives in open insurrection 
for her freedom; still adhering to her right of sovereignty with 
matchless fidelity and tenacity at immeasurable sacrifice of life 
and property. Of all this, the presence of England's army of oc- 
cupation IS England's practical admission. All Irish national char- 
acteristics, especially love of freedom, are acknowledged by En-Iish 
legislation and English statesmen. Nor can England have acquired 
any right over Ireland by prescription, because (a) prescription is 



IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

a domestic principle not applicable between nations; and (b) there 
can be no prescription of what is unjust : Grotius. A further his- 
torical basis, sufficient in itself, is, that at present a vast majority 
of the Irish population, of every race of which it is composed, re- 
gard foreign rule as slavery, and are animated by a reasoned de- 
termination never to yield a willing allegiance to foreign rule, to 
destrov it at the earliest possible moment, and to continue resistance 
to it until Ireland's sovereign independence is re-established and 
lecured. 

III. Ireland's constitutional right is supported by her meritorious 
record zvhen independent. The public profession of anxiety for 
civilization as a justification of the Great War gives special force 
to this claim. Ireland's unique services to civilization from the 
sixth to the twelfth centuries, especially during the eighth, ninth 
and tenth, when history shows that the services were most oppor- 
tune and important, strengthen her constitutional right and con- 
stitute an additional special claim upon Europe to enable her to 
resume her independence. The distinctions won by Irishmen in 
strange lands in those early times, as shown in this Statement, were 
triumphs for herself and benefits to mankind as noble as ever nation 
achieved; and not to the Continent alone, but to England also, as 
acknowledged by the A'enerable I'.ede. in marked contrast with Eng- 
land's subsequent treatment of Irishmen in England, and English 
laws against religion and civilization in Ireland. And throughout 
her agony of subjection and persecution Ireland has shown the per- 
manence 'of that spirit and attitude by never practicing persecution 
and by alwavs maintaining intimacy with the pure and noble. She 
has today no feeling for the peoples of other lands but reciprocal 
friendship, respect and a desire to co-operate with them towards 
increasing and securing happiness and peace amongst nations, by. 
as in the time of her independence, commercial and industrial as 
well as intellectual intercourse. All this constitutes an additional 
title to independence, an additional claim upon European nations, 
and an additional reason against leaving Ireland in subjection to 
the usurped power of a state guilty of the abuses of power ex- 
emplified in this Statement. 

IV. Ireland is inherently entitled to sovereign independence and 
international recognition. 'Eor nation as for individual, the right 
of self-determination is indefeasible. Endowed with all the quali- 
ties, properties and faculties essential to a State, she is entitled to 
exercise them. Ireland being replete with distinct national indi- 
viduality and animated with an inextinguishable desire to reahze 
the purposes of her being, she has never learned, from morality, 
or constitutional law. or" the course of history, any valid reason 
why she should not be. now as in the past, in the full enjoyment 



SYNOPSIS ' 3 

of sovereign independence; and she confidently submits that no 
valid reason exists ; that her natural endowments, which even Eng- 
land reluctantly admits in making them a pretext for persecution, 
are for Ireland's own purposes; and that foreign usurpation of 
power over her is an outrage upon her and a breach of international 
law, aggravated by the manner of its exercise and by the policy of 
defamation ; that it is her duty and her interest to throw off this 
foreign yoke ; and that in doing this she is entitled to international 
support. The inherent right of free intercourse with the outside 
world, now denied her, is also indestructible. We would ask the 
Peace Congress to note in connection with this proposition, that 
as a slanderous person is dangerous to society, so a slanderous State 
is dangerous to international peace, and that abuse of a country 
by those who are profiting by that country is suspicious. 

V. Ireland possesses adequate potential vtanpozver to maintain 
sovereign independence once established. General proof of this 
appears in the fact that the Irish nation still exists, in spite of the 
policy of extermination carried on persistently for 360 years, in- 
cluding, as will be found in this Statement, murder by Act of Par- 
liament; "extermination preached by gospel;" State-created famine; 
sale of Irish youths into slavery in the West Indies at 2.5 pounds 
each ; death of millions from famine and plague, culminating in the 
Great Famine in Queen Victoria's reign, and the exultation of the 
English press. This policy of extermination, adopted by Henry 
VIII, practiced by his daughters — Mary and Elizabeth, and ex- 
panded by James I, was brought to logical perfection of iniquity 
and the reduction of the population to one-third by Cromwell ; the 
murderers of the people being commonly rewarded out of the prop- 
erty of their victims. A nation that has survived that, the severest 
test of a nation's manpower of which there is record, must be in- 
destructible. And yet within forty years of the Cromwellian mas- 
sacres, the nation was once more able and generous enough to make 
a brave fight for an undeserving king, James II. English legisla- 
tion against Irish industries and trade threw the people onto the 
land ; the Penal Laws and laws hostile to agriculture cleared them 
off the land again ; the consequential State-created famine and 
plague overtook each other almost continually during the eighteenth 
century. The misery resulting from the Union and from hostile 
legislation and culpable neglect of official reports on the condition 
of the people perpetuated famine from 1815 till 1845. The Great 
Famine of 1846-7-8 was caused by carrying away the food grown 
by the Irish people to feed the English people, subjecting more than 
a million people to the most terrible of all deaths, and forcing nearly 
two millions into exile. Victoria, whom many of us have seen in 
the flesh, surpassed Cromwell in cruelty. The same policy of 
extermination was continued in milder but equally effective form 



4 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

down to 1914, when the population of Ireland was only half what 
it had been seventy years before, while that of England had more 
than doubled in the same period. The Irish race is now estimated 
at 30,000,000, less than one-seventh of that number being in Ireland ; 
a situation showing at once the fertility of the race and the neces- 
sity for freedom to enable them to live in their own country. 

VI. Ireland is apt for industries and trade as an independent 
State. When independent she had her industries and trade in the 
measure customary at that time ; manufactured her own require- 
ments ; used them with great profusion, as will be found set forth 
in this Statement, and exported a considerable surplus of commodi- 
ties in exchange for wines and silks. Her industries and trade 
underwent normal growth until the beginning of Elizabeth's reign. 
By the end of that reign there. was little of them left. Thencefor- 
ward wars and English legislation combined in hostility to Irish 
industries, chiefly by destroying the export trade on which they 
depended, a typical law, for example, peremptorily prohibiting the 
export of glass of Irish manufacture to any country whatever. 
After the Irish woolen industry had been destroyed by legislation in 
that spirit, and large numbers of people in the south of Ireland, 
thrown out of employment, the Government peremptorily forbade 
the founding of linen industry in the south of Ireland, although 
William III and the English Lords and Commons had publicly 
pledged "the utmost support in their power" to a linen industry 
in Ireland on the discontinuance of the woolen. Every manufac- 
turing industry founded with a prospect of success was deliberately 
crushed, and the people reduced to the land as their sole industry; 
whereupon Irish agriculture was similarly thwarted. Vast areas 
were cleared of people and turned to grass. A situation was 
created leaving no use for Irish people in Ireland. The number 
and stringency of the hostile statutes afford the most conclusive 
evidence of the persistent efforts of the Irish to practice almost 
any industry, and England's persistent determination not to allow 
them. The section of this Statement dealing with this matter 
needs to be read throughout, because the character of the legislation 
was such as would otherwise be incredible. Such statutes are not 
now necessary; they did their work too well. Their unspent force 
and unbroken pursuance of the policy make their effect permanent 
as if enacted yesterday. Independence alone can ever open indus- 
tries and trade for the Irish people in Ireland as they are open 
to free peoples. 

VII. Ireland is financially able to discharge the duties of an 
independent State. Bngfehd affords proof of this which even she 
cannot attempt to refute, by the amount of money she has abstracted 
from Ireland ; and the prospect of abstracting more is one of her 



SYNOPSIS 5 

reasons for retaining control as long as. she can. A country from 
which England has, on the findings of her own financial experts, 
abstracted, from the year 1800 to 1914, 400,000,000 pounds in ex- 
cessive taxes, in addition to what the government of Ireland cost 
in that time, possesses natural wealth which many an independent 
State might envy. A country from which Englishmen resident in 
England abstracted through the various public and private channels 
during the nineteenth century 1,300,000,000 pounds, without any 
return whatever, is represented by English statesmen and press 
as poor. If she be poor and England rich, there can be no doubt 
as to the cause. There may possibly be doubt whether the system 
of government should be regarded as an imperial license to plunder, 
or as a new species of fine art. We ask the Peace Congress to note 
that the same English government which alleges that this country 
is poor is at the present time extracting from Ireland an annual 
tax revenue at the rate of 40,000,000 pounds, spending less than 
13,000,000 pounds on the government and defense of Ireland, and 
appropriating to itself, without our consent, a net profit of 27,000,- 
000 pounds ; all out of the country which it alleges to be poor. Al- 
though these facts show that Ireland has ample financial strength 
to discharge the duties of an independent State, they in no way 
weaken her claim to the common justice of restitution of the ex- 
cessive charges and reparation of wanton damage inflicted upon 
Ireland, in accordance with international law and the practice of 
great States. Ireland is entitled to all that is due to her. The 
amount is more than England can conveniently pay. On obtaining 
independence and an international guarantee that it will be re- 
spected' in future. Ireland is willing, for the sake of peace, to accept 
an immediate payment of 500,000,000 pounds to help her undo the 
wreckage England has wrought and recover the due commercial 
and industrial position of which England has deprived her. 

VIII. Ireland is fit and prepared to resume the responsibilities, 
internal and external, of an independent State. A nation possess- 
ing the historical right, the special claim upon Europe, the inherent 
right, the manpower, the aptitude for industries and trade and the 
financial resources adequate for a sovereign State, is in possession 
of a large part of fitness for independence. What remains is 
chiefly organizing financial, administrative and judicial abilities and 
powers, which usually accompany the other possessions, but which 
arfe in our case being specially cultivated ; so that we stand today 
adequately equipped in all those departments for independence. We, 
the people concerned, who would sufifer if our preparations were 
inadequate, are confident of their efficiency for the security of life, 
liberty and property in Ireland, and the promotion of the country's 
highest interests and welfare. Eor obvious reasons the specific 
preparations and personnel cannot be disclosed here. England's 



6 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

present method of counteracting us in advance is intensive practice 
of her permanent policy of Divide and Rule, the unity of the 
Irish people being the greatest permanent danger to her power in 
Ireland. She knows that but for her persistent and strenuous 
exertions the entire Irish people would have been fused together 
long since ; that on their amalgamation English rule would no longer 
be tolerated, and that their harmonious amalgamation is certain 
as soon as her power to keep them apart is eliminated. Hence 
she stakes all upon her present efforts to keep the Irish divided. 
We look with confidence for complete amalgamation, prosperity 
and happiness as a result of independence, and security for its 
permanence. We invite the Peace Congress to rule on the merits 
of this simple issue. 

IX. Ireland is entitled to the right, common to nations and 
persons, of self-presen'ation against England's policy of extermina- 
tion. This elementary right is too self-evident to need argument. 
A nation or individual that had not the right of self-preservation 
had no right whatever. All other rights are embodied in that. If 
it were conceivable that this Peace Congress would acquiesce in a 
policy of extermination and destruction, it might well be said that 
there was no such thing as international law, 'because the saving 
of a nation from destruction would be one of the primary functions 
of such a law. The urgency of the need for its exercise arises from'' 
the continuance of England's policy and the imminent extinction of 
the Irish nation in Ireland if that continuance is tolerated. This 
supreme danger the nation is now determined to resist. It believes 
it still possesses sufficient power, but without international interven- 
tion the struggle might be long and destructive. In any event, 
better even rapid extinction in a worthy fight than the stealthy 
extinction planned by England. That is the situation. 

X. Ireland has rightly re-asserted her right in armed insurrec- 
tion in 1916. In the Great War, which, according to England, was 
to free the world from military government, no belligerent State 
on either side can, and no neutral State will desire to dispute the 
proposition wdiich has been made a text for the war, and a most 
powerful incentive for recruiting, namely, that the benefits most 
certain to result from the war were the elimination of militarism 
as a^ permanent system of government, and the independence and 
future security of small oppressed nations. See, as a specimen, the 
English proclamation at Bagdad. Nationality, not imperialism, is 
the principle to which appeal has been made everywhere ; and of all 
forms of bad government a foreign military government is unani- 
mously condemned as the worst. Irish Nationalists, with all the 
irresistible reasons shown in this Statement to guide them, and 
with a foreign military despotism in actual operation over them, 



SYNOPSIS 7 

:ouId not do other than regard with scorn professions they knew 
to be false, and were bound to assert their right, if only to let the 
world see how false the professions were. They would have been 
unworthy of freedom if in the circumstances they had failed to 
render this great service to Ireland and to mankind. We proudly 
submit the fact of their having done so as powerful additional sup- 
port of Ireland's claim, and thq execution of those patriots as crim- 
inals, in flagrant breach of the international convention of The 
Hague, 1907, Clause c, after they had fought for their country's 
independence, surrendered and laid down their arms, as conclusive 
evidence of England's unfitness to rule Ireland. England's appeal 
for recruits having been successful in getting millions of men to 
fight and slay each other, we now ask the Peace Congress to re- 
quire the States which made those professions and thereby got what 
they wanted, to fulfil their promises to the small nations. We ask 
especially that this be done in the case of England. We really 
want, not central countries only, but all countries, to be free from 
the danger of militarism ; and it is clearer now than it was when 
the belligerents said so that an essential condition for the abolition 
of militarism and the durability of peace is the re-establishment of 
the independence of oppressed nations. 

XI. Ireland's purposes on resuming independence are those of 
peace and progress. While on the one hand no right of inquisition 
exists to require a nation on re-entering the society of independent 
States to declare her intentions in advance, and on the other, any 
such declaration before power had been recovered would be merely 
academical and therefore unsatisfactory ; nevertheless, we are will- 
ing, subject to those qualifications, to gratify a natural desire, and 
it may be to help the Peace Congress to satisfy itself on this sub- 
ject. We are the more willing from the fortunate circumstance 
of being able to refer to our past for corroboration so strong that 
we actually make it one of the foundations of our claim. To 
emulate that past in harmony with the very different circumstances 
and with the greater facilities and varied interests of modern life, 
we hold to be a worthy ambition. We calculate that the essential 
work of rebuilding our State and most of its interests from the 
ruins, ridding ourselves of costly evils forced upon us, curing gross 
neglect, reviving and practicing our characteristic ideals, releasing 
faculties blasted by foreign riile. and fostering our domestic apti- 
tudes, will occupy most of us for a considerable time. A private 
individual's outline of our probable activities will be found in the 
part of this Statement to which this summary refers. It has no 
authority save the writer's, but may be accepted as typical of cur- 
rent thought. 

XII. Ireland's sovereign independence is essential to the Free- 
dom of the Seas. That her sovereign independence is essential to 



8 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

her own freedom of commerce is self-evident, and is demonstrated 
by the number and stringency of EngHsh laws for the destruction 
and prevention of Irish commerce : last illustrated by England's 
prohibition of the Hamburg- Amerikn line of steamships from call- 
ing at an Irish port in 1913, and by the fact that now, under direct 
English rule, most of Ireland's harbors are empty and have no com- 
merce. The necessary liberty to engage in commerce is one of 
the most important of our objects after independence itself ; because, 
favorably situated as we are, we look Avith confidence to a great 
commercial future for-an independent Ireland, and to a considerable 
revenue from that source. Ireland's geographical position makes 
its freedom, while vital for itself, important for other countries also. 
A powerful State intolerant of free commerce in a country subject 
to it would, in favorable circumstances, be equally intolerant of any 
commerce but its own, and is capable of using the geographical po- 
sition of Ireland, in conjunction with other strategic points in her 
possession, to the detriment and danger of all international com- 
merce. The freedom of the seas would then be an idle dream. 
The sovereign independence of Ireland is essential to make it a 
reality. 

XIII. England is disqualified and unfit to rule Ireland. This 
is abundantly demonstrated by every section of this Statement, as 
by every govermnental act of England over Ireland. Unconstitu- 
tional and criminal as that record is, it is not of misgovernment 
we complain, but of foreign rule, whatever its character. Its bad 
character is only secondary evidence for us ; but it is primary evi- 
dence against England. England first established her colonial parlia- 
ment in Ireland; made it the most corrupt assembly that ever bore 
the name ; made it a fit instrument for enforcing penal laws against 
religion and civilization and for keeping the colonists and the na- 
tion at pennanent enmity ; made it a classic exhibition of the futility 
of a subordinate parliament for any legitimate purpose ; and when, 
under popular pressure, the parliament showed a tendency to amal- 
gamate w^ith the Gaelic nation, bribed it to commit suicide. In the 
history of the subsequent relations between the two countries, since 
ameliorative legislation began to be talked of, it is the uniform ex- 
perience admitted by all, English as well as Irish, that the one thing 
that can always be predicated w^th certainty of any English measure 
for Ireland — other than a coercive measure — is that it will be bad in 
itself, or spoiled by its limitations, or by something hateful accom- 
panying it, by rubbing poison into an open wound, by delay, by the 
manner of giving, or by some of the many ways in which it is 
humanly possible to spoil a measure. In not one solitary instance 
has this rule been departed from. In the case of any other country, 
this phenomenon might be attributed to unfortunate coincidence. 
But the calculated result of English rule evidenced in the present 



SYNOPSIS 9 

deplorable condition of Ireland is an irrefutable reminder of deliber- 
ate injustice still, being perpetuated by the continuing effects of that 
rule aided by fixed policy and administration ; that England is 
profiting by her injustice to Ireland ; that England's spirit is un- 
changed ; and that it is only the persistence of the effects and the 
profits renders violently unjust measures unnecessary now. In these 
circumstances, tO' attribute England's hostility to gaucherie or co- 
incidence, might be charitable, but would be highly fantastic. We 
charge her before the nations with the supreme crime of wilful de- 
struction of a sister nation. We deny that she has any right to rule 
Ireland, w^ell or ill. Both on that ground and on the character of 
the rule, we ask the Peace Congress to declare England disqualified 
and unfit to rule Ireland. 

XI\''. Ireland claims recognition and interifention by the Peace 
Congress, restitution and reparation by Enghnd, and an interna- 
tional guarantee for her future security. Every section of this 
Statement which shows Ireland being treated as a victim country 
enforces this particular claim on grounds of justice and morality as 
well as of international law. Several of the facts revealed make 
intervention incumbent under that law as a duty on civilized States. 
Of this character is the policy of extermination. That policy im- 
poses on the Irish a duty of resistance even when there is no pros- 
pect of success. The indefinite continuance of such an unequal 
and deadly struggle is, in many respects, a most undesirable condi- 
tion to allow. As it ought not to be borne by the victim nation, 
neither ought it to be tolerated by nations which hold that such 
victimization is a breach of international law and a danger to in- 
ternational peace. The outrage is aggravated and the danger not 
lessened by the plea that the victimization of one nation by another 
is a domestic concern of the latter with which other countries have 
no right to interfere. The Congress will note that England, which 
uses the plea, has herself frequently interfered, and indeed boasts 
of her interference, in precisely similar cases under other powers, 
insisting that the abuses were matters of international concern. 
Her plea therefore assumes that international law is subject to Eng- 
land's interests, and that the States represented in the Congress 
are, like England, immoral entities. International recognition of 
her plea would be conclusive proof that civilization was really in 
danger, and would make peace necessarily unstable by divorcing 
it from justice. On all these grounds Ireland now claims 

SOVEREIGN INDEPENDENCE 

comprising the rights and powers 

Of designing, framing and establishing an Irish national 
constitution ; 



10 , IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

Of territorial inviolability, including islands and terri- 
torial waters as internationally recognized ; 

Of self-preservation by prevention of, defense against, 
and resistance to, economic or military hostility, war or 
peace, as self-preservation may demand ; 

Of free development of national resources by internal 
action, and by commerce, treaties, and relations with other 
States ; 

Of absolute control and jurisdiction over all persons, 
things, and rights within Ireland and its islands and terri- 
torial waters ; 

Of protection of her lawful citizens wherever situated; 
and 

Of recognition of her government and her flag and the 
external marks of honor and respect : 

and she claims partial restitution and reparation to the amount, 
namely, of 500,000,000 pounds, and an international guarantee for 
the security of her independence. 



IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 



The Irish Nation Earnestly Depires the International Peace 

Congress to Be Pure and Impartial in Its 

Constitution and Proceeding^. 

Assuming that this Peace Congress for the adjustment of differ- 
ences amongst nations in the interest of future peace and progress 
will be constituted as its high purposes require, and will be guided 
by the spirit of justice, it will have conscience, competence, knowl- 
edge, and impartiality commensurate with the magnitude and com- 
plexity of its task, and therefore with every part of the task and 
every international dispute submitted to it and within its jurisdic- 
tion, with or without the concurrence of any party to such dispute, 
such party having been given due notice of the submission of the 
case. Fully realizing the greatness of this occasion and its vast 
possibilities for good, we thank God that we live to witness it when, 
for the first time, an international tribunal of this character as- 
sembles for purposes so worthy. Knowledge of one of the cases 
to be submitted to it compels us to realize also the possibility and 
danger of the beneficent purposes of the Congress being frustrated; 
an event which mankind would rightly regard as a calamity of the 
first magnitude. 

It is commonly assumed that the Peace Congress will comprise 
representatives of States that have indulged for several years in 
physical conflict and in accusations of the basest crimes against each 
other. Of these States also some have been exposed as principals 
and some as accomplices in secret treaties conflicting with their 
professed purposes in the war, and even conflicting with each other; 
and shown by their secrecy and by their character to have been en- 
tered into without any popular sanction ; and therefore that vast 
numbers of men have been induced to fight and slay each other on 
a false issue. When Governments and States stand revealed in this 
enormous guilt, stealthily leagued together in an immoral and un- 
constitutional conspiracy against the free will of their own democ- 
racies, and against the self-determination of nations for whose in- 
dependence the democracies have been induced to fight ; gambling 
in the lives and liberties of peoples they misled ; deflecting in advance 
the proceedings of this Congress ; complicating its task and treating 
it with contempt which the pettiest court of justice would within 
its own jurisdiction restrain and punish, the villification of character 
during the war is seen to be justified as applied to such States ; and 

11 



12 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

the question arises, important for the Congress and for all to be 
afifected by its decisions, whether the Congress will admit to its de- 
liberations, and to the power of adjudicating within it, representa- 
tives of those States stained with the lifeblood of countless innocent 
men; and if they be admitted, subject to what conditions. Surely 
not on an equality with representatives of States and nations ap- 
proaching the Congress with profound respect, clear conscience, and 
clean hands. 

We respectfully suggest to the latter States and nations — who 
alone are competent to do it — to hold a preliminary session con- 
sisting of themselves exclusively, and consider and settle the com- 
position of the Congress, and devise means of preventing the scan- 
dal and misfortune of the adjudicating function on this unique and 
solemn occasion being to any extent entrusted to, or exposed to 
the influence of, representatives of States guilty of the gravest and 
most dishonorable offences against mankind and against the Con- 
gress itself. Should it be pleaded in extenuation of the making of 
secret treaties that the practice has hitherto been general, the States 
in preliminary session will observe, in the first place, that that plea 
amounts to an admission that nations have been generally deceived 
by their rulers, conduct intrinsically indefensible which the Congress 
hopes to stop and prevent; in the second place, that indefensible 
secret treaties can be no excuse for other secret treaties in conflict 
with them and for public promises in conflict with both, as in the 
case of Poland, by which the lives of countless innocent men have 
been sacrificed on a false issue; in the third place, that the plea is 
a notice of intention to continue secret treaties to frustrate the 
labours of the Congress; and in the fourth place, that to allow the 
guilty States to adjudicate on those acts and on matters arising out 
of that conduct would be an outrage on the conscience of mankind. 
Whichever offence came first, it is enhanced by the second, third 
and fourth ; and as the war in connection with which those offences 
have been committed is. the most costly of human life in all histor}% 
the offences are proportionately great. 

Friends of the Peace Congress, of its highest purposes and of its 
character, without which all else were vain, have a right to know 
the company they seek to enter; whether a State unable to justify or 
defend its conduct will be allowed to question the status and oppose 
the recognition and representation of a nation older than itself and 
guiltless ; and whether adequate and effective precautions are taken 
to prevent any exercise of the power of undue influence and cor- 
ruption permanently inherent in a powerful, wealthy, and experi- 
enced State temporarily reduced to the status of a party in a contest 
with a nation submerged by that State. Other nations may deal 
with other offenders, if such there be. The offender whose conduct 
and status we challenge is England, called by herself Great Britain. 
These and further questions of a like character would arise spontane- 



CHARACTER OF PEACE CONGRESS 13 

ously in any event. But that would be at a stage of the proceedings 
too late to deal with them; and unless dealt with in advance the 
proceedings would be vitiated and any decision discredited. Besides, 
they are raised with acuteness which cannot be overlooked by the 
declarations of English statesmen and the press of England — one 
of the States exposed as conspiring in secret treaties — to the effect 
that England, notwithstanding her contempt of the Congress, will be 
represented in it and have such influence over it as will prevent Ire- 
land — one of the primary sovereign States of Christendom — being 
represented in it. This project, which is England's will and pur- 
pose, would amount to supporting might and crime against right, 
and in the interest of might and crime pre-judging Ireland's case 
without hearing it. We invite the preliminary session of uncontam- 
inated States to estimate the amount of sincerity there is in Eng- 
land's charripionship of the Liberty of Small Nations submerged 
and oppressed by other Powers, while herself submerging and op- 
pressing this small nation, preventing its voice being heard outside 
its own borders, and plotting to exclude it from this unique Congress 
in which England herself expects to sit in judgment. England's 
assumption of power to do in advance what the Congress alone 
is competent to do would be presumptuous on the part of any 
State ; but is especially so on the part of a State which has conspired 
against its own professions, against freedom, against justice, and 
against the impartial action of the Congress. Such conduct can have 
no other aim than to make the Congress a trap under English con- 
trol, instead of an international tribunal of impartial justice. It 
therefore seems to amount to a further contempt of the Congress. 
We are bound to assume that both parts of the English Statement in 
question are false ; in which case the making of them is a grave 
offence, but the executing of them would be an international crime. 
The chief purposes professed by England in the war, and used 
successfully by her for recruiting for her armies, were "to save 
civilization," and "to liberate small oppressed nations." The latter 
purpose she could have achieved without war to the extent of the 
small nations oppressed by herself. If the Peace Congress should 
allow a State which has profited by the professions of these purposes 
to the extent of getting what it wanted, to deceive and continue to 
oppress those who trusted its profession, without suffereing in status 
before the Congress, the resulting harm would not be limited, to the 
discredit of the offending State. The power of this Congress for 
good would be gravely impaired, and not peace but intolerable 
tyranny and just resistance would ensue. Resistance is the shadow of 
injustice, and peace can be assured only in the degree in which injus- 
tice is eliminated. There is no rule or principle of international 
law necessitating the admission to an international Congress of 
representatives from a State which adds to previous offences that 
of treating the Congress and its purposes with flagrant contempt ; 



14 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

and still less is there any rule or principle justifying a Congress 
comprising such representatives excluding from its deliberations 
and decisions freely chosen representatives of an offending nation 
vitally concerned. 

We condense this Statement of Ireland's case to the smallest di- 
mensions consistent with intelligibility, holding ourselves ready to 
expand and explain it, or any part of it, and to furnish the Peace 
Congress in every way in our power with whatever further informa- 
tion it may desire. And here at the outset, in order to put this 
august Tribunal in a position to deal conclusively with the whole 
case, we reduce it to its elements by unequivocally impeaching 
English government of Ireland, historically, constitutionally, civilly 
and criminally. We are able and compelled by interdependent facts 
to sustain the charges made in this Statement on these grounds in 
every instance of English aggression that we submit, and in every 
additional instance that the Congress may judge to arise out of the 
case and call upon us to substantiate. Desiring that the Congress 
should ennoble itself in the esteem of posterity by the performance 
of an overdue duty to an ancient nation, to humanity, and to justice, 
we earnestly ask all its members, jointly and individually, to receive 
the representatives of Ireland and give favorable consideration to 
their claim for the restoration of Ireland to its ancient place in the 
family of sovereign States. We are willing that England be afforded 
an opportunity of making any defence she conceives she can make. 
Conscious of the righteousness of our demand, we ask that both 
parties. England and Ireland, be heard and treated alike, with equal 
impartiality in all respects ; neither party being suffered to assume 
the attitude of judge. We ask the Congress to remember that the 
common phenomenon of private life, that a wrong-doer rarely for- 
gives his victim, has its analogy on a great scale in the matters 
which the Congress is about to consider. 

We submit for consideration by the representatives of nations not 
involved in the secret treaties or in the false promises, assembled in 
preliminary session, the following facts which appear to us to dis- 
qualify England for adjudicating in the case between herself and 
Ireland, each of which facts is developed in the appropriate parts 
of this Statement. They are all such as England herself, if she had 
clean hands and another State were guilty, would certainly denounce 
as strongly as we do: 

(1) England's frequent infidelity to treaties, of which those relating 
to Ireland and to Egypt are examples. 

(2) England's treaty policy of silence on disputed questions of mari- 
time international law, and afterwards acting in her own interest, 
regardless of the law. 

(3) England's infidelity to the public professions on which she entered 
upon the Great War. 

(4) England's complicity in secret treaties, deceiving those fighting and 



CHARACTER OF PEACE CONGRESS 15 

dying for her, and trafficking in the right and lives of innocent 
people. 

(5) England's agreement in advance with Italy to frustrate a pro- 
posal for European peace, because made by the Pope, irrespective 
of its merits. 

(6) England's persistent policy of exterminating the Irish by arms, 
by fire, and by State-produced famine. 

(7) England's wanton destruction of Irish civilization, and her treat- 
ment of religion and learning as felony. 

(8) England's persistent policy, still in vigorous operation, of defam- 
ing Irish national character. 

(9) England's permanent policy of military occupation and oppression 
of Ireland. 

(10) England's prevention of commercial intercourse between Ireland 
and other countries. 

(11) England's breach of The Hague Convention, 1907, Clause c, by 
executing in 1916 patriots, who, having fought for liberty, sur- 
rendered, laid down their arms, and were prisoners of war in her 
hands. 

(12) England, being the party accused in this case, is incompetent to 
adjudicate in it. 



II. 

Ireland is Entitled to Independence as One of the Primary 
Sovereign States of Christendom. 

A nation once in the enjoyment of sovereign independence can 
lose the right of sovereignty only by its own voluntary act. Ireland 
has lost the independent exercise of its sovereignty, but without the 
consent of the nation, and therefore has not lost the right of sover- 
eignty or its status as a sovereign State, and therefore has not lost 
the right to resume the exercise. Conquest alone confers only phys- 
ical control. It cannot confer a right of sovereignty against the 
will of the population. All legitimate power comes from God to 
the people, and is vested by the people, expressly or tacitly, in 
rulers of their choice. There is no question here of president, prince, 
king, emperor, or form of government, but of power. It is not a 
question of persons, but of the thing, power. There is no legitimate 
power but from God. From God all power of jurisdiction passes 
to the community, and from the community to governments. There 
is no legitimate power from any other source or through any other 
channel. For the exercise of this power those upon whom it is 
conferred are responsible to those who confer it. Any government 
denying its responsibility to the governed thereby confesses its power 
illegitimate and unconstitutional. For any right to grow out of 
conquest, just cause for the aggression, physical occupation of the 
country, and acquiescence of the inhabitants would be essential. In 
the case of Ireland, the first and third of these essentials are absent, 
and the second was absent for three centuries and a half after the 
invasion. 

Ireland is not called upon to prove that she gave no just cause for 
any of the instances of English aggression because it has never been 
alleged that she did. 

There is no conquest apart from occupation. A country is con- 
quered only so far as it is occupied by the supposed conqueror. Any 
part of such country not effectually occupied is not conquered. 
For three centuries and a half after the Anglo-Norman invasion no 
English power occupied more than a small fraction of Ireland, con- 
sisting of the Pale and a few other skirts of the country and port 
towns, as had previously been the case with the Danes and Norse- 
men a few centuries before, when they conquered England, but only 
made temporary settlements in Ireland. The Anglo-Norman inva- 
sion of parts of Ireland in the twelfth century was temporarily suc- 
cessful in some of those parts and established colonies in them. It 
was not, any more than the Norse, an invasion of the whole coun- 

16 



HISTORICAL TITLE 17 

try, nor successful in all the parts invaded. Conquest, even when 
completed by occupation, not being a right, but an expression of 
power, binds only while the power is maintained. As soon as this is 
withdrawn or ceases, the original rights of the conquered people re- 
vive and resume their freedom of activity. x\ fortiori, this is the case 
when a conquest has been achieved by vile and illegitimate means. 
The right of sovereign independence is neither destroyed nor lost 
nor forfeited by temporary and unwilling dependence in obedience 
to superior force and without acquiescence beyond the submission 
extracted while that force is maintained. Invasion and partial con- 
quest by military force, not followed by occupation for three cen- 
turies and a half, never acquiesced in, the invaders partially absorbed 
and partially repelled during that time, the extent of the English 
Pale reduced until in the middle of the sixteenth century it comprised 
only Dublin, Meath, and Kildare, of a district of only thirty miles 
long by twenty wide, and even within that limit the Irish language, 
laws and customs prevailed ; that being the nature and extent of the 
Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, it was a failure and never be- 
came a conquest of the country. 

The political constitution of independent Ireland was an electoral 
hierarchical monarchy, the election being determined by qualifica- 
tions rather than birth, the sovereignty being in the people — "the men 
of Eirinn" — and the position of the monarch resembling that of 
the president of a modern republic. The whole body of free clans- 
men, including kings, sub-kings, and chiefs, made the laws. These 
were promulgated at the great Feis for the nation; at local assem- 
blies for the local communities; and administered by the monarch, 
sub-kings, chiefs and brehons. The people were not subjects of 
king, sub-king, or chief, but his fellow clansmen ; or, as it would 
now be expressed, his fellow citizens. The monarch was assisted 
and the nation served by the sub-kings, and these in turn were as- 
sisted and the local communities served by the lesser chiefs. The 
necessary qualifications for monarch, sub-kings and chiefs were set 
out in the law ; and comprised efficiency in arms, a specially high 
standard of education, and judicial training; so that Irish kings 
were competent to lead their forces in battle when necessary, to ad- 
minister justice in certain cases, and to patronize learning and art, 
some of them being themselves learned men. It is doubtful if there 
is any instance in history in which the political and social structure 
was so thoroughly democratic. The most striking element in the 
whole Irish polity was its elaborate and admirable system of indeg- 
enous laws, not equalled, nor approached by the native laws of any 
other ancient nation except Rome. At the time of the invasion Ireland 
happened to b.e, like many other countries then, temporarily bereft 
of a supreme monarch, and consequently of the national solidarity 
which had enabled it to overthrow the Danes and Norsemen in 1014. 



18 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

Having lost the strong central bond, the congeries of sub-kingdoms 
and local communities became exposed, especially under inimical 
external influences backing rival claimants, to develope jealousies 
toward each other, to think more of local and personal than of na- 
tional independence, and to fall short of the patriotism necessary 
for a joint national effort to preserve the country's integrity. For 
her own local domestic purposes, Ireland was better circumstanced 
in this condition than any other country would be in a like condi- 
tion, owing to its homogeneity of territory, race, civilization, lan- 
guage, law, religion, literature, history, music, and all the elements 
of mutual interest and esteem. One indivisible country set apart 
from the rest of the world and thus endowed formed a most dis- 
tinct and apparently indissoluble nation. It would be hard to name 
any other nation then or since enjoying so many elements of unity 
and harmony. So great was the binding force of all these elements 
common to the whole country that the local fabric, political, social, 
and administrative, easily held together and maintained the local in- 
stitutions of the country in efficiency for three centuries and a half 
without any central authority to brace them together for a national 
eft'ort ; and this, too, though an enemy was clinging on to the skirts 
of the country and the port towns all the time. It was her oneness 
in so many respects, but especially in her unrivalled legal system, 
that maintained Ireland's local institutions and solidarity so long 
against hostility. On the other hand, paradoxical as it may appear, 
this condition was a cause of Ireland's fatal military weakness. 
While the local system worked efficiently for local purposes, the 
necessity for a strong central authority for national purposes was 
less obvious ; and there grew^ up a fatal confidence in what seemed 
their unbreakable interlaced cohesion. Of all the elements that 
contributed to this remarkable achievement, the same excellent sys- 
tem of laws administered uniformly in all parts of the country by 
the brehons probably contributed most. This in itself is conclusive 
proof of the degree of suitability which those institutions and law^s 
had attained, and the attachment of the people to them, and the 
character of the people so attached. This confiding attachment, 
admirable in itself, by inspiring false local security, helped with 
other causes to prevent the consolidation of the nation for ridding 
the country of the foreigner. 

Settlers in the English Pale were occasionally summoned by 
agents direct from the government of England to assemble in con- 
ferences which they were pleased to call "parliaments" before that 
word had acquired a national meaning, to adopt resolutions drafted 
in England and dignified with the name of "statutes," such as 
the "Statute of Kilkenny," with a view to fresh aggression; and 
the importance of those documents has ever since been magnified 
by England. Their operation never extended beyond the narrow 



HISTORICAL TITLE 19 

area of the Pale ; and according to the English themselves they did 
not operate even within that. Nevertheless, the Irish kings, princes 
and people became accustomed to imperfect conceptions of national 
duty, to dissensions fomented amongst them by English agents, and 
to drift instead of policy, until a stage was reached when none of 
the royal families of Ireland could with hope of full national sup- 
port assume the sovereignty of the whole Island. That office was 
left derelict. The princes of Connaught and Munster attempted to 
revive it in 1258 in favor of O'Neill ; but after a brief struggle 
England's policy of Divide and Rule prevailed. In default of a 
sufficiently strong Irish personality, the prince who was historically 
best entitled to succeed to the monarchy — Donal O'Neill — conceived 
the patriotic idea of abandoning his own claim in favor of an out- 
sider more likely than himself to^ command the obedience of the 
other Irish princes and chiefs. With this view, he sent a consider- 
able force to help Robert Bruce at Bannockburn, of which the grant 
to him of Kincardine-O'Neill made by that king of Scotland is 
striking testimony. O'Neill's real object was that Ireland should 
benefit by the prestige of Robert Bruce's victory by making his 
brother, Edward Bruce, King of Ireland. Edward landed at Glen- 
arm in 131.5, and, after two successful military campaigns, was 
solemnly crowned at a council of the principal princes and chiefs 
of Ireland held near Dundalk, King of Ireland in 1316. Donal 
O'Neill surrendering to him by deed all his rights in the sovereignty. 
On the 14th October, 1318, King Edward, contrary to the almost 
unanimous advice of the Irish chiefs, entered into a rash engage- 
ment with a large English army before the mass of his own forces 
had arrived, and was slain. ' So ended Donal O'Neill's experiment. 
An address sent to the Pope is extant to show that, until then at all 
events no right of England to rule Ireland was recognized. 

A century later Ireland's historical sovereignty was asserted in 
the face of Europe by the representative of the very country that' 
w^ould rather deny it, by King Henry V of England. Finding him- 
self refused admission to the International Council of Constance 
in 1415, on the ground that England was only a fragment of the 
German nation, and had never been recognized as a sovereign State, 
he boldly declared that he had conquered Ireland, one of the original 
sovereign States of Christendom, and was entitled as the representa- 
tive of Ireland, and thus obtained admission. The pretense of con- 
quest was at that time untrue. The fact of Henry having success- 
fully resorted to it estops England from denying Ireland pre-exist- 
ing right as a sovereign State. Meanwhile the counterforces of 
English aggression and disruption on one side and the quiet absorp- 
tion of the colonists by Irish civilization on the other continued. 

Henry VIII of England was the first English sovereign to claim 
sovereignty of Ireland, 1541. In doing so, he made no pretense 



20 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

that a right of sovereignty had descended to him from Pop,e Adrian, 
or Henry II, or Henry V, or from anybody else. Taking advan- 
tage of internecine strife which his agents had carefully fomented, 
and of the consequent despondency of Irish princes and chiefs, and 
departing from the policy of his predecessors who had convened 
only parliaments of the Pale, Henry had all Irish princes and chiefs 
invited, with promises of titles of earls and barons, to parliaments in 
Dublin, together with the Anglo-Irish lords of the Pale; and because 
of that invitation, whether the Irish attended or not, the parliament 
was called an "Irish Parliament." No member was elected. They 
were only summoned in the King's name. Several parliaments of 
this kind were convened during Henry's reign. Only a small num- 
ber of Irish chiefs attended, and that stealthily, without the consent, 
or even' the knowledge, of their respective clans. The proceedings 
were conducted in the English language, which few of the Irish 
chiefs understood, Gaelic and Latin being the languages they spoke. 
Matters on which they were desired to vote were translated into 
Gaelic, a procedure obviously open to abuse. A parliament of this 
sort in 1541, 33 Henry VIII, was induced to declare Henry VIII 
King of Ireland and pledge the allegiance of Ireland to him. As 
some years earlier in England, so in Ireland now, the inducement 
for complying with the king's wishes was the prospect of getting a 
share of the church and abbey lands in the Pale which Henry had 
appropriated and was about to distribute. In this the lords of the 
Pale were not disappointed. They did not enjoy the lands many 
years, because of their failure to adopt the new religion. The 
principal Irish chiefs of the time had not attended those Parliaments. 
Those who had attended had no authority whatever from their 
people for the action in which they concurred. According to Irish 
constitutional law, without such authority their action could not 
bind even their local clans, still less the whole nation. But more 
than this, when the people heard what their chiefs had done. they, 
in most cases, immediately assembled, denounced, repudiated, and 
deposed the renegade chiefs, and elected in their stead braver and 
truer men. The new earls and barons on returning to their homes 
were spurned by their peoples ; and the chiefs elected in their stead 
in some cases, notably in that of Jf)hn O'Neill — "Sean the Proud" — 
maintained against all the power of England the positions conferred 
upon them by their clans, and had to be recognized by England as 
independent princes, in complete disregard of the English title- 
beaders. Thus Ireland's right of sovereignty was maintained un- 
impaired. 

Even Queen Elizabeth, notwithstanding the politic achievement 
of her father, did not at first claim to have inherited the sovereignty 
of Ireland. Afterward she and her English parliament apparently 
perceived a necessity for some constitutional foundation for their 



HISTORICAL TITLE 31 

pretensions, and accordingly invented one. The Statute II Eliza- 
beth, c. 1., of 1569, solemnly traces Elizabeth's title to Ireland from 
King- Gormund, son of the noble King Belin of Great Britain — two 
personages not known to either history or mythology. It is im- 
possible to attribute this invention to ignorance in the age and 
country of Shakespeare and Bacon. If England had at that time 
a good title to rule Ireland, it would have been stated, and not a 
false one. Apparently their fiction did not help them much in the 
conquest of Ireland ; for we read in the English State Papers of 
1578 that "All the English, and for the most part with delight, even 
in Dublin, speak Irish and gradually are spotted in manners, habits, 
and conditions with Irish stains." How calamitous ! There is, 
however, more grim reality relative to England's title in Ireland 
in the records of the following century. One of the counts in the 
indictment on which Strafford, Deputy of Charles I., was tried and 
executed was that he had described Ireland as a conquered country ; 
and one of the counts in the indictment on which Charles I. was 
tried and executed was that he had brought soldiers from the for- 
eign country, Ireland, to fight his own subjects. Thus was the 
theory of an English conquest of Ireland repudiated by England 
down to that date. On the other hand, the Tudor attempt at con- 
quest was at once the first effective rally of the English to conquer 
Ireland, and therefore the first strong incentive to the Irish nation 
to make a national effort, instead of its previous local and spasmodic 
efforts. Resulting from it was the subsequent formidable effort 
of Hugh O'Neill. The battle of Kinsale in which he was defeated 
in 1602 marks the definite destruction of the Irish national polity. 
The subsequent achievements of that great soldier and statesman, 
Owen Roe O'Neill, were attempts at restoration ; which also failed. 
A new phase was reached when a Stuart king of royal Gaelic 
race succeeded to the crown of England in addition to that of 
Scotland. It was clearly within the right of the Irish, in accordance 
with their own system and with international law, if their circum- 
stances rendered it desirable, to adopt such a man as their legitimate 
king. Constitutionally, their doing so did not involve any recogni- 
tion of either England or Scotland as a kingdom dominating Ire- 
land, any more than the accession of the Scottish king to the Eng- 
lish throne involved domination by Scotland over England. It 
seems that such an idea no more entered the minds of the Irish 
people than when they had adopted Edward "Bruce two centuries 
before. They never consciously acknowledged either English or 
Scotch supremacy. Their whole Jacobite literature, the fullest and 
most authentic embodiment of Irish thought on the subject, may be 
searched in vain for a single expression of recognition of either 
England or Scotland as a kingdom entitled to dominate Ireland. 
Not only that, but this literature champions the Stuart cause as 
being the cause of the Gael against the Gall (stranger) ; the only ag- 



32 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

gressive stranger being the English. In all this the Irish may 
have made a grave tactical mistake, having regard to the English 
character. Here we are not concerned with the tactical prudence 
or imprudence of the course adopted, but with a nation's title 
according to constitutional law. From that point of view, and as- 
suming that that law should be respected, the conduct of the Irish 
was not open to question. Had that law been respected, the course 
followed could have conferred no power upon England, nor brought 
evil to Ireland. However much their wisdom may be questioned, 
they neither violated constitutional practice, nor conferred any right 
over them upon either England or Scotland, nor surrendered the 
principle of national independence. The egotistical James I., or his 
English advisers in his name, apparently took a map of Ireland, 
marked on it places at which they imagined there ought to be towns, 
but in many of which there has never been town or yillage before 
or since, created at those places parliamentary boroughs, convened 
a parliament of the whole of Ireland, and took care that govern- 
ment clerks and other Englishmen should sit in the parliament for 
those imaginary boroughs, and that they and the pro-English of 
the Pale should constitute a safe majority to carry any measure the 
king and his English government desired. So numerous were the 
Englishmen eager to fill those seats, and such little regard was had 
for constitutional law, that in the first of James's parliaments, ac- 
cording to its own statement, men sat as members and voted who 
did not represent any constituency real or imaginary. All the 
Irish chiefs of note, except one. on seeing the composition of the 
body to which they had been invited, and in which it was the evident 
intention that they should have no power, withdrew at the outset, 
and did not attend anv further parliament of James. The solitary 
exception was Roger O'Moore. He persisted in attending all those 
parliaments in the character of an Irish sentinel. He thus gained 
knowledge and experience which he generously placed at the service 
of the national cause later. 

The only Irish parliaments in the modern sense fairly representa- 
tive of the entire country that have ever been held were, however, 
held within the Stuart period and supported the Stuart king as 
King of Ireland against England. The first was the Confederation 
of Kilkenny, 1043-1648. The second was the parliament of James 
II., ]fi89. in Dublin. The Irish nation and the Pale were repre- 
sented in both. 

When the Stuart cause was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne 
and the defeat confirmed by the capitulation of Limerick. Ireland 
was at last conquered in the ordinary military sense. The Irish 
thereupon reverted to their pre-existing right which they had never 
forfeited. England reverted to the want of right which was her 
condition before the Stuarts. Queen Anne of England, though 
called a Stuart, never reigned as a legitimate Stuart sovereign, but 



HISTORICAL TITLE 23 

only under the parliamentary title conferred upon William the 
Dutchman by the Act of Settlement and inherited afterwards by 
the Georges and their descendants. The Irish nation was not rep- 
resented in the parliament creating or conferring that title, and 
has never consciously recognized it as applying to Ireland, nor 
recognized any sovereign under it, however absolute his or her 
power may have been in Ireland. The only medium of expression 
then left to Ireland was her literature. That teems throughout 
the eighteenth century, as at all other times, with passionate asser- 
tions of Ireland's distinct nationality. The nation stood at that 
time despoiled of all its property and without arms, ruled by the 
colony as England's instrument with England's power ; denied ever}' 
right properly belonging to citizens ; denied the right of education ; 
disarmed mentally as well as physically, told from the judicial bench 
that the law did not acknowledge their existence and that it was 
only by tolerance of the colonists a Catholic could breathe in 
Ireland ; in short, the nation was outlawed and therefore not in a 
position to make any national effort. "The policy of such bar- 
barous victors, who condemn a subdued people and insult their 
feelings, has ever been, as much as in them lay. to destroy all ves- 
tiges of the ancient country, in religion, in polity, in laws, and in 
manners ; to confound all territorial limits ; to put up their proper- 
ties to auction ; to crush their princes, nobles, and pontiffs ; to lay 
low everything which had lifted its head above the level, or which 
could serve to bind or rally in their distress the disbanded people 
under the standard of old opinion: " — Edmund Burke. 

Take Dean Sivift's characteristic comparison of the Catholic 
body with the Presbyterian body, towards which he w^as equally 
hostile : "It is agreed among naturalists that a lion is a larger, a 
stronger, and more dangerous enemy than a cat; yet if a man 
were to have his choice, either a lion at his feet fast bound with 
three or four chains, his teeth drawn out, and his claws pared to 
the quick, or an angry cat in full liberty at his throat, he would take 
no long time to determine." 

Nevertheless, when the manhood of the colony, goaded by Eng- 
lish tyranny even against themselves, and encouraged by the success 
of the American colonies against the same oppressor, realized the 
necessity for a national effort, and reconciliation with the Catholic 
nation as a condition of its success, and called for the emancipation 
of their estranged brothers, the submerged nation promptly showed 
its appreciation and, so far as it was allowed, and so far as the 
movement was for national independence, sympathized with and 
helped the colonists. They took much more than their proportionate 
share in the insurrection promoted by the colonists in 1798, as 
Wolfe Tone, the genius of that movement, w-ell knew. Since then 
the principle of that insurrection, with its declared object of an 
independent Irish Republic under a green-white-and-orange flag, 



24 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

has continued to be the ideal of all Irish nationalists, so unmistak- 
ably manifested that no one acquainted with Ireland doubts it. 
Some profess to doubt it for preconceived purposes. For such as 
are not acquainted with Ireland, the opinion of Lord Cornwallis — 
the Viceroy — in whose interest it was to deny such a fact, must 
be conclusive. Writing on the 12th December, 1798, to Major Gen- 
eral Ross, he said of the Catholics : "Their dispositions are so 
completely alienated from the British Government, that I believe 
they would be tempted to join their bitterest enemies, the Protes- 
tants of Ireland, if they thought that measure would lead to a total 
separation of the two countries." There has never been a day in 
the history of the connection between the two countries when the 
Irish nation did not desire total separation from England with the 
same intensity. The Viceroys of 1829. 1848. 1867 and 1916, if their 
writings were available, no doubt bear similar testimony to the in- 
destructibility of Irish national sentiment. 

A partial conquest of a portion of a country; after the lapse 
of three centuries and a half extended by deception and fraud 
rather than by force ; partial extermination of the inhabitants and 
plantation of alien colonists instead ; the elevation of those colonists 
to, and maintenance of them in, an artificial ascendancy over the 
nation; the conquest never acquiesced in; always repudiated, re- 
sented, and resisted; always necessitating the maintenance of a 
foreign army of occupation in Ireland ; that sort of unfinished and 
unfinishable conquest never having escaped the taint of military 
force, and always doomed to end with the withdrawal of that force, 
is never capable of extinguishing a nation's inherent and historical 
right to sovereign independence, and never capable of creating any 
new prescriptive or other sovereign right in the aggressor. No 
claim based upon either conquest or prescription could avail against 
a pre-existing right so tenaciously held. 

Grotius says (Marc Libermn), "That the last defense of injustice 
is usually a claim based upon prescription or custom ; that prescrip- 
tion is only of domestic application; that there can be no prescrip- 
tion between free and independent nations ; and that no lapse of 
time can give a prescriptive right to anything unjust." Here we 
are content to rest Ireland's constitutional claim to sovereigTi in- 
dependence. 



III. 

Ireland's Constitutional Right is Supported by Her 
Meritorious Record When Independent 

The Peace Congress, if it should so desire, is entitled to know 
the general characteristics of the Irish nation while independent, as 
an indication of what may be expected from it when restored to 
independence. We the more willingly supply a summary of the 
information, that it is of such a character as constitutes in itself a 
powerful claim for the said restoration. 

At the beginning of the Great War and during its progress the 
saving of civilization has been one of the professed objects of the 
Entente Allies. The war itself, in its sacrifice of human life and 
otherwise, has furnished conclusive proof of civilization being so 
badly in need of saving that no effort towards that end should be 
spared and no available help neglected. Whether war and the 
forces and passions let loose by war are civilizing agencies and not 
the reverse, has always been questioned by some, and is now 
doubted by many. The interests of civilization and justice, which 
are akin, are not limited by geographical or political boundaries, 
and are neither represented nor safeguarded by military or naval 
force. The greatest and most successful civilizers the world has 
known had no such forces. Civilization everywhere suffers when 
the heirs of a particularly high culture are reduced by armed force 
to an inferior position in their own country. Of this, Greece is 
the most familiar example. No one denies that the degradation 
of the Greek nation and the destruction of Greek art and literature 
were a calamity not only to Greece, but to Europe, perhaps to the 
whole world. Similarly, if in a less degree and less known, the 
destruction by England of the Gaelic civilization and culture, and of 
the Gaelic polity which nursed them and facilitated their diffusion, 
has been a crime against Europe as well as against Ireland. 
Whether the profession of solicitude for civilization as an object 
of the war be sincere or not, Ireland rejoices at it ; believing there 
is sufficient spirit in Europe to compel the States to do something 
towards making their profession good ; because that is precisely the 
department in which Ireland achieved her greatest distinction in the 
time of her independence ; because she feels an impulsive desire to 
take part again in a work so congenial to her ; and because the pro- 
fession of such an object of the war renders relevant and necessi- 
tates a reminder to Europe, by way of brief resume, of Ireland's 
contribfltion to human progress and felicity, and of the destruction 
of her activities and the organs of them by England. 

25 



26 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

The most fruitful result of the omission of imperial Rome to con- 
quer Ireland, and the most beneficial to European civilization, was 
that the fall of the Roman Empire, which produced a cataclysm of 
civilization elsewhere, had no such effect in Ireland, but contributed 
to a contrary effect by making Ireland a safe and congenial refuge 
and hospitable home for learned men driven from their own respec- 
tive countries by frequent disturbances. Those refugees came, not 
to teach, but to learn, to avail of the hospitality, schools, lectures, 
and libraries in one of the few countries where these were then to 
be found and from which teachers issued. "No country had fur- 
nished a greater number of missionaries for Christianity — from no 
other motive than pure zeal and an ardent desire of communicating 
to foreign nations the opinions and faith of their country. The 
Irish were great travelers ; and always gained the hearts of those 
whom they visited, by the extreme ease with which they conformed 
to their customs and way of life. This facility of manners was 
allied in them with an extreme love of national independence:" — 
Augustine Thierry, Norman Conquest, II., 121, 122. It was no 
ordinary service of this kind rendered to Europe that won from 
the Emperor Charlemagne a handsome present sent through the 
hands of a special envoy to the Irish university of Clonmacnoise 
on the banks of the Shannon. The father of English history, the 
Venerable Bede, corroborates the imperial appreciation when he 
says (liber III., c. 27) : "The Irish willingly received them all, 
and took care to supply them with food, and also furnished them 
with books to read, and their teaching gratis." Good cause he had 
for making this acknowledgment, for his own countrymen flocked 
in such large numbers to several of the Irish schools that in that of 
Armagh alone they seem to have constituted a third of the three 
thousand students there, since a third of the city, called the Trian- 
Saxon, was allotted to their exclusive use. Students came from 
most European countries, but in smaller numbers or single indi- 
viduals. Ireland was then the only country in which eminence in 
any department of learning conferred a legal status equal to that 
of prince or noble. But for Ireland and the living flame of learn- 
ing and sanctity kept aglow in Ireland, and generously poured out 
over Europe from the sixth to the twelfth century, but especially 
during the eighth, ninth and tenth, when the Continent most needed 
such help. Europe might have lap^^ed into barbarism — a danger from 
which the Great War has not delivered us. but has shown us how 
little removed we still are from the precipice. In those centuries 
there were more and bigger schools in Ireland than in any conti- 
nental countrv. Indeed a large part of Europe possessed nothing 
of the kind, bi? or little. No seat of learning then in Europe could 
rival the principal schools in Ireland in the number and ability of 
teachers, the number of pupils, or the character of the men sent 
forth; and there was none, except in Italy, of which an Irishman 



MERITORIOUS RECORD 27 

was not founder or principal of Staff, All this is attested by the 
fact that Charles the Bald, having obtained an important Greek 
work which he wanted translated into Latin, and failing to get any 
man on the Continent competent to do it for him, got an Irishman 
to do it most satisfactorily. 

Ireland's lavish contribution to the civilization of Europe was 
not undertaken or achieved in the modern egotistical spirit of leaving 
prim records for home reading, or extending trade "under the flag" 
with a view of imperialistic domination, but for the self-sacrificing 
purpose of rendering the highest service to mankind. Setting out 
with neither money nor property of any kind, but two leathern 
satchels slung over the shoulders, one of books, the other of re- 
ligious articles, those wandering philosophers — "Vendors of Wis- 
dom" — went wherever they chanced to get a trading ship to take 
them gratis. They scattered themselves from Iceland through the 
Scandinavian countries, Gaul, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Germany, 
Bavaria, Austria, Bulgaria ; to encounter martyrdom in some coun- 
tries, success and honor in others. It is quite probable that the 
very best of them may have been slain, leaving no recognizable trace 
behind. Their work and its fruit are known only to their Maker. 
But much is known, and the common indebtedness to Ireland which 
contemporary and subsequent records of some of those countries 
vouch, as well as the names of Irish saints and scholars commemo- 
rated in churches and schools founded by them or dedicated to their 
honor, constitute at once the most authentic and the most noble 
external evidence of the superior culture of Independent Ireland, 
the extraordinary abundance of talent that could, from a small 
nation, scatter itself over so many, and the boundless charity that 
impelled it to render this help so opportunely to nations to which, 
in the utilitarian sense, she owed nothing. 

The grand procession of Irish philosophers and evangelists was 
maintained unbroken from the days of the Venerable Siedhail 
(Sedulius), the Poet of Truth, who had read Greek in Ireland 
in the fifth century, by such men as Saint Fursey, Abbot of Pe- 
ronne ; Fiacre, whose name has been familiar in France since the 
sixth century; Frigidian, Bishop of Lucca; Gall (Gallus), whose 
name is commemorated in the school he founded and the canton 
of Switzerland in which it is situated; Colum (Columbanus), 
founder of the schools of Luzueil and Bobbio ; Cattal of Lismore 
(Cathaldus), Bishop of Tarentum; Dungal, founder of the Univer- 
sity of Pavia in 822 ; Dicuil, the Geographer, John Scotus Eriugena, 
Arbogast, Bishop of Strasburg; Donat (Donatus), Bishop of Lecce 
in the seventh century ; Donatus, Bishop of Fiesole in the ninth 
century ; Fridolin of Connaught, the Wanderer, Abbot of Poitiers 
and Seskingen ; Moengal (Marcellus) of St. Gall; the second 
Sedulius, of Liege and Milan; Maelbrigte (Marianus Scotus), the 
historian of Fulda and Meyance; Muiridach (Marianus Scotus) 



28 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

Abbot of Ratisbon; Sedna (Sidonius), Archbishop of Bavaria; 
Fergal (Vergilius), the Apostle of Carenthia and Archbishop of 
Salzburg; Killian, founder of the monastery and school of Wurz- 
burg; Gilla-na-Naomh, who labored, in the same place, and more 
of like character than would be reasonable to name here. 

Of Joannes Scotus Eriugena, the Master (ninth century), 
Haureau says (Vol. 1, p. 112) that he was the "first born of scho- 
lastic philosophers." "With what astonishment, nay, more, with 
what respect does not the grand figure of this teacher inspire us, he 
caused so much agitation in the Schools and in the Church. He 
sowed the winds and reaped the whirlwinds. He knew how to 
brave them. He did not leave one direct heir of his teaching; but 
he at least has the glory of having announced, or having preceded 
Bruno, \ enani, Spinosa, the boldest logicians that ever have wan- 
dered under the plane trees of the academy The 

appearance of such a man in such an age is, in every respect, an 
extraordinary phenomenon. It is as if one met some monument 
of art standing erect in the sands of the desert." Rousselot says 
(La Philosophie dans le Moyen Age, p. 13) : "By his freedom of 
thought, and by the relative beauty of his soul, he imparts to his 
epoch a certain perfume of antiquity which distinguishes it from 

all others He thought like a new man while he 

spoke like the ancients." Heinrich Zimmer says {The Irish Ele- 
ment in Mediaeval Culture, p. 103) : "Dungal, Johannes Scotus, 
Clemens, Sedulius, and Ivloengal are representatives of a higher 
culture than was to be found on the Continent of their day ; to a 
purely Christian training and a severely simple habit of mind, they 
joined the highest theoretical attainments, based upon a thorough 
knowledge of the best standards of classical antiquity. These 
Irishmen had a high mission entrusted to them; and they faith- 
fully accomplished their task." 

The Irish race should be unnatural if they did not feel thrilled 
by the voices of those grand Irishmen calling across the ages from 
the many lands in which they labored, in unison with our own, that 
when the civilization w^hich they sowed and nurtured is in danger 
and needs saving, their dear native land may be enabled to take 
some part in that great work by having restored to her the sovereign 
independence which she then enjoyed, of which they were the drifted 
flowers, and which she used so generously and so well. The in- 
herent right of independence thus historically fortified constitutes 
such a claim for recognition as we think no other nation coming 
before this Peace Congress can present, and one which no State 
really concerned for civilization can on the merits disregard. 

It must not be supposed that Ireland's energies were all expended 
in intellectual efforts alone. Civilization has many aspects. It was 
a standing rule at the monarch's palace that no stranger should be 
allow^ed to enter unless he was an ollamh (professor) of some 



MERITORIOUS RECORD 29 

branch of knowledge or a master of some art or craft. The exist- 
ence of such a rule, whether enforced or not ; even a belief that such 
a rule existed, was wholesome. Significant also in a more homely 
way is the ancient Irish proverb of the "three slender things that 
best support the world, the slender stream of milk into the pail ; 
the slender blade of green corn above the ground ; the slender thread 
over the hand of a skilled woman." All arts, both of use and orna- 
ment, were encouraged and rewarded. In spite of all the subse- 
quent willful and wanton destruction, we still possess from the 
days of Ireland's independence creditable specimens of Irish archi- 
tecture, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, and artistic metal work 
and woodwork, some of priceless value as well for their beauty as 
for their antiquity. 

From the most ancient times Ireland abounded in linen and 
woolen cloth, all of domestic manufacture. All Irish women were 
brought up to spin, weave, knit and embroider. Foreign writers 
attest the great abundance of linen in ancient Ireland. "Ireland!" 
they say, "abounds in lint which the natives spin into thread and 
export in enormous quantities to foreign nations. In former ages 
they manufactured very extensively linen cloths, the greater portion 
of which was absorbed by the home consumption, as the natives 
allowed thirty or more yards for a single cloak, which was wound 
or tied up in folds. The sleeves also were very capacious, extend- 
ing down to the knees. Need I mention the common linen covering 
in several wreaths on their heads, or the hoods used by others ; for 
a w^oman w^as never seen without a veil or a hood on her head, ex- 
cept the unmarried, whose long ringlets were tastefully tied up in 
knots, or wreathed around the head and interwoven with some 
bright colored ribband. If to this we add the linens for the altar, 
the cloths for the table, the various linen robes of the priest, and 
the shrouds that w-ere wrapped around the dead, there must have 
been a great abundance of linen in Ireland." We read of Saint 
Brigid that "she spun and wove with her own hands the linen cloths 
w^hich were wrapped around Saint Patrick's sacred remains :" Dr. 
Lynch, Cambrcnsis Eversus II., 169. 

They had also an artistic sense of color and a complete system 
of dyeing, the secrets of which have been lost during the ages of 
persecution. They extracted dyes from the roots, flowers, and ber- 
ries of certain native plants and herbs ; and they also cultivated 
certain imported plants for the same purpose. Tributes were fre- 
quently paid in cloth. In suitable cases the people competed with 
each other in beauty of color as well as of texture. Irish rugs, 
blankets and quilts were highly appreciated in England and on the 
Continent for their downy softness and warmth, texture and color. 
Irish cloths were well known in continental markets from the tenth 
to the fourteenth century. The finer varieties were famous in trade 
and in song in Italy, and especially in Florence, the home of the 



30 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

most artistic weavers in the world, not so much for their value as 
ordinary drapery, but as articles of art and luxury. They were 
used by royalty, aristocracy, civic functionaries and their wives for 
the trimming and fabric of State robes and for general ornamenta- 
tion. Some Italian and Spanish poetical laudation of Irish serges 
will be found in Mrs. Green's "Ireland's Making and Its Undoing/' 
p. 53 et seq. In those days the ports of Sligo, Galway, Limerick, 
Dingle, Bantry, Baltimore, Kinsale, Cork, Dungarvan, and Water- 
ford — all now idle — were engaged in the various import and export 
trades with the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and 
the Levant. The exports comprised corn, meats, and kindred prod- 
ucts, fancy leathern articles, gloves, linen, and woolen yarns and 
cloths, timber for furniture, etc. The imports comprised wines, 
silks, fruits, and spices from the southern countries. There are 
records showing the existence in Genoa of a hospital for the Irish 
early in the twelfth century; a thing which would not be if the trade 
were not considerable and the Irish merchants solicitous for their 
countrymen. All this is evidence of intellectual, commercial and 
industrial intercourse between Ireland and the Continent. Tacitus 
observes that Ireland was more accessible by sea than Britain. 
There was more continental intercourse with Ireland, due partly 
to that, partly to the character of the Irish people, and partly to 
the fact that until the Norman conquest of England, overland 
traveling was not always safe. Even under the Tudor shadow 
down to the reign of Queen Elizabeth of England, the Irish con- 
tinued to manufacture various textiles with such success that her 
greatest ministers deemed Irish cloaks and mantles worthy presents 
from one to another, and her poet Spenser embellishes his "Fairy 
Queen" with the mention of some of them ; though he was base 
enough to write his "Viezv of the State of Ireland" in which he 
favors the extermination of the Irish, and actually took for himself 
a beautiful place on the Munster Blackwater from which the Irish 
owner had been expelled. 

Irish Arms. In more modern times Ireland has been forced 
by her circumstances to establish a collateral claim upon interna- 
tional friendship by conduct entirely different from that of her days 
of independence — a claim founded on chivalry to support that 
founded on peaceful civilization. It is not to be supposed that any 
of the gallant nations that are indebted to Irish arms for help in 
their respective periods of stress will forget their indebtedness when 
at last an occasion has arisen for showing practical gratitude by 
that simple act of justice involving neither loss nor risk — recognition 
of Ireland as a sovereign State. France will not forget the names 
of O'Brien, MacCarthy, O'Neill, O'Donnell, MacMahon, which 
stand in the roll of her heroes. Spain will not forget the O'Don- 
nells, O'Neills, O'Sullivans, O'Reillys, O'Dalys, O'Doyles, O'Far- 



MERITORIOUS RECORD 31 

rells, Austria will not forget the O'Donnells, O'Reillys, O'Con- 
nells, O'Briens, Fitzgeralds, Nugents, Laceys, Lallys, Taaffes. Nor 
will magnanimous Russia forget the services rendered her by Count 
O'Rourke. The United States of America, grown great in free- 
dom, cannot forget Ireland's contribution in brain, muscle, and 
courage, to the forces that won that freedom for her, or the large 
part Irish genius, virtue and ability constitute in America's present 
greatness, stability, and benevolent purpose towards mankind. 



IV. 

Ireland is Inherently Entitled to Sovereign Independence 
and International Recognition. 

The ancient sovereign State of Ireland long suppressed by force, 
has always existed in abundant possession of all the inherent at- 
tributes and qualities of a Sovereign State ; her right of sovereign 
status never having been lost or abandoned ; distinct in her history, 
the character of her people, and her geographical position ; amply 
endowed with all the physical, moral, and intellectual resources 
proper to a State, as the various sections of this Statement show; 
all of which distinctions have been recognized by the nation most 
interested in denying them, namely, England; formerly recognized 
by penal, laws against religion and civilization ; and by restrictions 
on Industries and Trade; in modern times recognized by English 
legislation and rule designed and calculated to prolong the effects 
of that period ; at present recognized by English-made laws differ- 
ing from those of England, such as the dis-establishment of the 
Protestant Church, Land Acts, Coercion Acts, Arms Acts, and the 
absence of English Divorce and Polygamy Laws. Hence the onus 
of proof rests upon whoever denies that Ireland is a distinct na- 
tional entity. England has estopped herself from denying it, hav- 
ing always made our distinct national characteristics, especially 
our love of national independence, her pretext for oppression. To 
us, what England recognizes or denies is immaterial ; we mention 
them only to confound our only enemy. 

It is self-evident that if we have any right at all, we are entitled 
to the conservation of our people, with all their capabilities, all 
they can produce, all the available yield of the land, water, and air 
of Ireland ; all her contents, powers, facilities and rights, internal 
and external, unrestricted use of all with which nature has endowed 
Ireland ; unrestricted intercourse with whatever countries we please ; 
freedom of opinion and action on all things affecting Ireland, sub- 
ject only to the universal law of respect for the property and rights 
of other nations ; and of all these the Irish nation has the common 
right which accompanies all persons and property — the right to de- 
fend and protect herself and her property and rights, and to treat 
as an enemy whoever interferes with her free exercise of any of 
her rights. The possession of them bears with it the right to their 
free enjoyment and defense. Accompanying the foregoing, Ireland 
has a present imperative necessity for the exercise of her rights as 
a condition of her continued existence ; and a determination as 

32 



INHERENT TITLE 33 

imanimous as any country has ever had to save herself from ex- 
tinction by breaking the power of the stranger and resuming ex- 
clusive self-control. A country not having these rights would have 
no right whatever. The right of a nation to exclusive self-control 
is as obvious as the right of personal liberty to an individual. The 
elementary international law which recognizes every nation's right 
to use its liberty in any way not detrimental to any other nation, 
is universal, comprising Ireland's right to rule herself and enjoy 
what nature has made hers ; and as a consequence sweeps away any 
pretense in any other country to rule Ireland. But, an English 
statesman or journalist may say, all those rights taken together 
would amount to absolute independence. Certainly ! the sum of 
them, absolute independence, is neither less nor more our right in 
Ireland than a similar sum is England's right in England. It also 
happens to be antecedent and superior to England's right in England 
historically; and has never been forfeited, as England's has been. 
It is only voluntarily a nation's right to independence can be lost. 
Ireland never having lost her independence voluntarily, has never 
lost her right to resume it. If any right were recognized in one 
nation to rule another, without the consent of the latter, many un- 
answerable questions would immediately arise, such as the extent 
of the rule, wdio should set a limit to it, whether there should be any 
limit, whether the dominant nation might extirpate or devise the 
extinction of the other — a vital question actually raised in the 
present case . Wherever and to whatever extent such vital matters 
are left in doubt, there is tyranny and anarchy and absence of in- 
ternational law. No nation has or can acquire a right to rule an- 
other nation against its will. So strong are these reasons that the 
proposition of this section stands by its own strength. 

It is only an imbecile, nation or individual, that voluntarily sub- 
mits to external control. Every controller, w^hether individual or 
nation, controls for selfish interest. Aliens to make elaborate use 
of powerful machinery for misrepresentation, defamation, and villi- 
fication, and to prevent the victim nation's voice being heard, and 
to call the victim's condition "British Liberty", does not make it 
liberty of any kind. It is slavery wherever and whenever prac- 
ticed, and no matter wdiat adjective is applied to it. Aliens to ex- 
tirpate the people by force and sword and famine and plague, and 
confiscate their property, and call that treatment "British Liberty", 
does not make it liberty of any kind. It is slavery, wherever and 
whenever practiced and no matter what adjective is applied to it, 
Aliens to destroy and restrain the lawful industries and trade of a 
people, and reduce them to the status of unskilled laborers, in order 
to eliminate competitors with the aliens, and to call that restraint 
"British Liberty" does not make it liberty of any kind. It is slavery 
wherever and whenever practiced and no matter what adjective is 
applied to it. Aliens to devise skillful means for draining all the 



34 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

financial resources of the people into alien coffers for alien pur- 
poses, including the strengthening of the aliens' power over the vic- 
tim people, and to call that ''British Liberty," does not make it liberty 
of any kind. It is the negation of liberty. It is slavery wherever 
and whenever practiced, and no matter what adjective is applied to 
it. Aliens of whose entire conduct in great and in small things in 
the country whose rule they have usurped, of which these are typical 
examples, to call the misery and desolation their conduct produces 
"British Liberty", is to insult the intelligence and outrage the moral 
sense of mankind. They are violating the law^s of nature, of na- 
tions, and of morality, and are enemies not alone of the victim 
nation but of mankind. 

Ireland is jealous of her inherent rights, material and immaterial, 
gross and sentimental. The sum of them — sovereign independence 
— is her demand. When she comes to consider her inherent rights 
separately she begins with her good name. In normal times and 
circumstances opinions may differ with regard to the comparative 
merits of treating slander wath reasoned encounter or with silent 
scorn, the person or nation slandered being the proper judge. "It 
is not with much credulity I listen to any when they speak evil of 
those whom they are going to plunder," says Burke. That has been 
largely the attitude of Ireland. But the same reasons do not apply 
in abnormal times, least of all on the occasion of an International 
Congress assembled to adjust international relations with a view 
to a durable peace, when all that seriously militates against peace 
and hiutual respect should pass under review and be included in 
the adjustment. A slanderous State must be as dangerous to in- 
ternational peace as a slanderous person to social peace. To such 
a State nothing is sacred. Slander, by striking at the very founda- 
tion of mutual respect, renders peace impossible, and creates a situ- 
ation in which peace ought not to exist among self-respecting na- 
tions. Such nations do not hold their honor cheap, and cannot 
transact business affecting their relations while allowing one of 
them license to villify another. As the honor of a nation, like that 
of an individual, is more precious than its property, and far more 
sensitive and delicate, second only to its life, so the wilful slander 
of a nation and destruction of its reputation is worse than any 
specific material injur}- ; in addition to which, it always carries with 
it material injurv impossible to measure, incalculable as to extent 
and duration. When one of two nations desiring to participate in 
an International Congress assembled for a purpose of the utmost 
importance to mankind slanders the other, either one or the other 
is unfit to be admitted to that Congress. If the slander is true, the 
slandered nation is unfit ; if untrue, the slandering nation is unfit — 
doubly unfit if the immediate purpose of the slander be to have the 
slandered nation excluded. Thus^ a situation is created by the 
slander which must necessarily produce great injustice unless in- 



lA'HERENT TITLE 35 

vestigated. A skilful slander widely diffused is proverbially diffi- 
cult to overtake and correct. 

English rule in Ireland is in its entirety an abuse of power. It is 
also an abuse of power in every part of it. The first of the abuses 
of power with which we charge England, because the one of earli- 
est origin, longest continuance, and least limited in extent and dura- 
tion, is her systematic slander, defamation, and villification, of our 
national character. It began so long ago as the twelfth century, 
and is in operation, increased a thousand fold in volume and malice, 
in the twentieth. The first invaders, having found Ireland a desir- 
able country tO' make their homes in, acquired as much of the coun- 
try as they could by the sword and by prudent Irish marriages, and 
had no interest in telling falsehoods of the people with whom they 
immediately began to amalgamate. The same remark applies to 
most of the subsequent permanent settlers. As soon as they and 
their children had shed their foreignness and were absorbed in the 
superior civilization of Ireland, marrying Irish wives in successive 
generations, the foreign blood and spirit were replaced by the Irish, 
and the efforts of the newcomers to restrain them from amalgamat- 
ing were mostly futile. In spite of these efforts, the Fitzgeralds, 
Burkes. Powers, and many others became indistinguishable from 
their purer Gaelic neighbors, except by their names. Having come 
and lived amongst the Irish, they loved them and desired to form 
part of them. The English at home kept jealousy alive in their 
hearts, as though they could never forgive the unmeasured hospi- 
tality with which their poor scholars had been treated in the ancient 
Irish schools, according to their own historian, the Venerable Bede. 
What a characteristic English return when, in 1422, the English Act 
of Parliament. I Henry VI., c. 3, expelled all Irish students as such 
from Oxford University. That their expulsion was for no cause 
but their being Irish is conclusively shown by the readiness with 
which the expelled students were received in continental universi- 
ties. In spite of not very creditable efforts in England and in Ire- 
land to perpetuate estrangement and enmity, the amalgamation of 
the races went on in Ireland. The English slanderers of Ireland, 
clerical and lay, down to the Tudor period, were ill-mannered Eng- 
lish sojourners who came with hardened hearts and fixed purpose 
to resist the assimilative character of the Irish to which the settlers 
had succumbed, and to find in all things Irish material for their 
idle pens to turn to base uses. Their race is far from being extinct. 

With the Tudors the influx of an inferior class of people from 
England, impelled by the commercial spirit, attracted by the natural 
wealth of Ireland, and covetous to make it their own, increased 
to the extent of forming for the first time, a self-sufficient colony 
determined to adopt nothing Irish but the people's property, and to 
dominate instead of amalgamating with the nation. Their com- 
plete want of conscience and their inordinate avarice killed in them 



36 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

the ability to appreciate anything less material than wealth and 
power. They steeled mind and heart against every manifestation 
of human feeling and aspiration and against the natural and un- 
conscious attraction of the Irish character. This community con- 
sisting of enemies and critics enormously increased the slander in 
volume and in malignancy. It was an instance of a community 
undertaking a policy of slander previously conducted by isolated 
individuals. Intending, as their conduct showed they did. to de- 
prive the Irish of their property and appropriate it, determined by 
sheer success of brute force to overcome or outlive the common 
knowledge that falsehood is evidence of a bad cause, and there 
being no real pretext for their conduct, one had to be invented. 
That of slander seemed the easiest and most adaptable to any set 
of circumstances. To be sure, it could at best be only a weak 
justification for appropriating other people's property; and besides 
it had to encounter obstacles. Therefore, as soon as the Saxons 
had acquired sufficient power their first care was to destroy Irish 
institutions, churches, schools, and other evidences of civilization 
which had prevailed until then ; knock out the brains of priests, 
brehons, ollamhs, and schoolmasters ; seize and destroy the precious 
manuscript books ; reduce the people to a condition in which revival 
should be impossible; and then proclaim to the world that Ireland 
had never had any civilization until those colonists arrived to im- 
part one. It was a vast undertaking, and a strange one for colonists 
professing to have come over for "Godly purposes." England has 
the distinction of being the only country mentioned in history as 
having treated learning as a crime, forbidden it in a country in 
which England's own sons had got free education, then told the 
world that Ireland had never had any learning, and used that 
slander as a pretext for persecution. Apart from the consequences 
of which it was made the pretext, a policy combining such ingrati- 
tude and malice has never had a precedent in the records of tyranny ; 
and it is to be hoped it will never have a copy. When the worthy 
Elizabeth became their queen, she saw worn in her court, amongst 
the fairest there, robes woven and dyed by pure and modest Mun- 
ster and Connaught girls, who were incapable of conceiving that 
there were monsters in the world who would aim at their destruc- 
tion for no cause. Before Elizabeth had reigned long Munster and 
Connaught were devastated and strewn with human carcasses and 
ashes ; the artistic artisans, male and female, who had been so in- 
nocently proud of their work, and so inofifensive, were in untimely 
graves or hiding themselves in hunger and thirst and nakedness 
from Elizabeth's terrible soldiery; and all for no cause but their 
being Irish in need of "civilization." 

"When antagonism has bred hatred towards another nation, and 
has consequently bred a desire to justify the hatred bv ascribing 
hateful characters to members of that nation, it invariably happens 



INHERENT TITLE 37 

that the political arrangements under which they live, the religion 
they profess, and the habits peculiar to them, become associated in 
thought with these hateful characters — become themselves hateful, 
and cannot therefore have their natures studied with the calmness 
required by science :" Herbert Spencer, Study of Sociology. 

The policy of slander once entered upon, there was no going back. 
The greedy English crowd that swarmed for lucre into Ireland be- 
came intoxicated with the richness of their spoil, and proclaimed 
that Ireland had never had any civilization and industries, and that 
they themselves had, of their goodness, come to redeem a savage 
people. It is to prevent contradiction of this atrocious falsehood 
that they evinced special zeal in the destruction of all the manu- 
script books they could lay hands upon. Their policy persisted in 
for generation after generation strengthened their grip on the coun- 
try and gradually disabled the people from counteracting their slan- 
der, until at present the world is witnessing the application of the 
resources of a mighty empire to the vile policy of slandering and 
representing as not entitled to common justice a nation victimized, 
drained, and exhausted for the maintenance of that empire and 
for the payment of the campaign of slander itself; this system of 
misrepresentation and propaganda of falsehood being combined with 
superlative arrangements for preventing any independent Irish man 
or woman, or a word of truth from Ireland, reaching the outer 
world. England has cut us off even from our own kindred, exiled 
by her oppression. We believe that England's elaborate organiza- 
tion of wilful falsehood and calumny is itself evidence to the world 
of injustice in her system ; that it is a grave danger to the future 
peace of the world ; and that it furnishes indirect and unwilling 
evidence of the inherent right of the Irish nation to be freed from 
those toils by sovereign independence. 



V. 

Ireland Possesses Adequate Manpower to Maintain Sovereign 
Independence, Onee Established. 

Ireland's fertility in manpower is best shown by a cursory review 
of England's policy of extermination, and the endurance of the 
Nation in spite of that policy ; and the evidence has the quality 
of irrefutability, being furnished by the enemy, England. 

The expropriations and colonizations attendant on the invasion 
under King Henry II of England, which did not extend far, were 
eiTected by the sword's edge, were soon to a considerable extent 
reversed by the same weapon, and need not occupy us further here. 
Of Henry's licenses to his followers to conquer and seize all the 
lands they were able, most remained unexecuted. 

Henry \'III was the first English sovereign to plan and put into 
operation feasible methods for a conquest of the whole of Ire- 
land, the substitution of English for Irish tenure of land, and, if 
possible, the substitution of English planters for the Irish people. 
This bold design of exterminating a nation sharply ditTerentiates 
England's modern policy in Ireland from the previous policy of 
military conquest, which had failed. It was a policy which could 
not be proclaimed in a Christian world, nor admitted if challenged, 
especially in foreign countries. It needed cautious beginning and 
the preparation of pretexts. It was suggested to Henry to ''take 

first from them their corn so that the Irishry shall 

not live thereupon, then to have their cattle and beasts .... 
and then they shall be without corn, victual, or cattle, and thereof 
shall ensue the putting in effect of all these zvars against them;" 
State Papers. 2, III, 329. The magnitude of the undertaking was 
also recognized: "Thus to enterprise the zvhole extirpation and 
total destruction of all the Irishmen of the land it zvould he a 
marvelous sumptuous charge and great difficulty;" State Papers, 
3, III, 176. Henry himself wrote: "Now at the beginning politic 
practice may do more good than exploit of war. //// such time as 
the strength of the Irish enemies shall be enfeebled and dimin- 
ished:" State Papers. 2, III, 34. His successors, Tudor, Stuart, 
Republican. Dutchman, and Hanoverian, did all they could, con- 
sistently with some politic regard for the feelings of Catholic con- 
tinental nations, to carrv out the policy of extermination. They 
disregarded Henry's politic practice towards the Irish ; but then 
that was expressly intended for the beginning and until the Irish 
should be enfeebled and diminished. From that time to the present, 
English government of Ireland has been a continuous war upon the 

33 



MANPOWER 39 

Irish nation — frankly open war until 1779, gradually concealed war 
since then. 

Whoever looks for the first time into the State Papers and 
other raw materials for the history of English rule in Ireland 
from the accession of Henry VIII until 1779 — the materials, be- 
cause Irish history remains substantially unwritten — will be aston- 
ished to find there revealed on an immense scale a form of legal 
fraud of wdiich he probably never read or heard or dreamt, namely, 
the art of finding, inventing, creating, and utilizing without scruple 
or remorse technical flaws in titles to land, though held by the 
owner in unbroken succession through his family, as actually proved 
in several cases, for periods extending to five hundred years. Under 
the Gaelic (Brehon) laws which had prevailed in Ireland from be- 
fore the dawn of history, all the land of each clan's territory be- 
longed to the entire clan; portions being set apart for the use of 
the chiefs and other clan officials ; to whose successors — not neces- 
sarily their heirs — it descended, for their services to the commun- 
ity; the rest of the arable land being subject to periodical distribution 
to meet the requirements of the young men on attaining manhood 
and entitled to a sufficiency of land as a birthright. There was 
neither landlord, nor tenant, nor rent to pay, nor power of eviction— 
except by expulsion from the territory for a heinous crime — the 
title of all being equally good according to the law, and the chief 
being only life-owner of his demesne. The English pretense that 
this simple system was barbarous and unintelligible was refuted by 
the fact that every clansman knew, or could ascertain whenever he 
desired, the precise acreage of land to which he. was entitled. There 
were tributes to pay for expenditure on public purposes, such as 
the making of roads and the sinking of rivers, but no rents. The 
precision and justice of the system was attested by the comparative 
absence of friction or legal disputes regarding land. No English 
authority was ever invoked on such a subject, nor did any clan 
appeal for English help or protection against its chief. As English 
power spread over the country, chiefs began to fall awav, no doubt 
some of them tempted by the prospect of being declared owners of 
the lands owned by their clansmen, as w^ell as of their demesnes. 
Each such renegade when made an English peer undertook an oath 
to "forsake and refuse his own name and state" ; adopt a title in- 
stead, and hold any land the king or queen gave him as a "mere gift." 
When subsequently they found themselves mere tools of England for 
plundering themselves as well as their country, they learned the truth 
of the bard's warning, "best reject the foreign desigtiation, lest 
thou and thy patrimony part company." The English, as soon as 
they had acquired sufficient power, declared all titles to land bad, 
offered English titles in substitution for them, and bv guile and 
threats of confiscation induced many to accept their titles. Under 
English law these new titles to land required registration to vali- 



40 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

date them, a ceremony of which the Irish were not informed. The 
ceremony was conveniently omitted. Owing to that omission, or 
some other technical flaw, or pretext, the new English titles were 
soon declared bad. Or, after an Irish owner's death an English 
spy challenged the title of deceased family to succeed to the proper- 
ty on the allegation that the deceased owner had not been married 
and had therefore no legitimate heirs, and that his property lapsed 
to the Crown, which meant in practice to the spy himself or some 
other of his class. The usual ground for the allegation was that 
the deceased owner had not been married in a Protestant church ; 
an institution which in most cases had not existed in his parish at the 
date of his marriage. In various ways titles were attacked in detail 
and lands confiscated and given to Englishmen, or, if more con- 
venient for the cheats, an enormous fine was imposed on the owner 
to take out an English title for his land ; which English title in turn 
might be subsequently declared defective, and a similar ordeal had 
to be gone through again. Such was the nature of what the English 
called "Settlement." 

The first confiscation in bulk was that of the Fitzgerald estates 
in County Kildare following the rebellion of Silken Thomas. It 
did not involve many of the inhabitants. On an opportune pretext 
extensive confiscations and extermination of rich and poor were car- 
ried out in Leix and Offaly under Queen Mary, the O'Connors and 
O'Moores being expelled, their lands seized, English settlers planted. 
Queen's and King's counties formed and their capitals named Mary- 
borough and Philipstown after the Queen and her husband. If the 
modern dictum be true, that a notice to quit was equivalent to a 
sentence of death, it would be difficult to find a phrase strong enough 
to characterize wholesale extermination without notice. But much 
worse was to follow. Immediately on the accession of Elizabeth the 
fierce and bloody work began in Alunster on invented rumors of Ger- 
aldine plots, with the result that when her Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, 
made a tour of inspection in 1567, he was able to report to her that 
"such horrible and lamentable spectacles are there to behold as the 
burning of villages,, the ruin of churches, the wasting of such as 
have been good towns and castles ; yea, the view of the bones and 
the skulls of dead subjects, who, partly by murder, partly by famine, 
have died in the fields, as in troth hardly any Christian with dry 
eyes could behold." The policy of extermination had been put in 
force there by burning corn in fields and haggards, the slaughter or 
removal of the people's cattle, the destruction of their homes, the 
slaying of themselves. 

On the murder of John O'Neill, Sean the Proud, King of Ulster, 
the Act II Elizabeth, c. 1. 1569, attainted him and all his adherents 
and confiscated their property, thus opening up a wide area for 
English agents to prey upon. 

In 1574 the Earl of Essex wrote home thus : "In the end it may 



MANPOWER 41 

be put to her (the Queen's) choice whether she will suffer this 
people to inhabit here for their rent, or extirp them and plant other 
people in it. The force which shall bring about the one shall do 
the other; and it may he done zvithout any sJiozv that such a thing 
is meant." Elizabeth did not long leave any doubt as to what her 
choice was. In 1577 Captain Cosby, an Englishman planted on 
confiscated land on the borders of Kildare, purported to prepare 
a banquet on a large scale on the Rath of Mullaghmast, to which he 
invited all the Irish nobility and gentry of a wide area round about, 
privately spreading a rumor that refusal to accept the invitation 
would be regarded as want of amity. Of more than 400 guests 
only one man escaped with his life. All the rest were massacred 
in cold blood. Many families were wholly wiped out. Of the 
O'AIoores alone ISO were slain. Little wonder the name O'Moore 
is scar;:e now. Such was the policy of extirpation. 

In 1579, after the suppression of the Geraldine League, Raleigh 
and ^^'ingfield at the head of English soldiery captured 800 prisoners 
of war who had surrendered and laid down their arms, and had 
them all thrown off the rocks into Smerwick Harbor — a further 
exhibition of English chivalry and the policy of extirpation. 

In 1583 the Act 23 of Elizabeth, cc. 7 & 8, attainted the Earl of 
Desmond and a vast number of his adherents by name, and con- 
fiscated and cleared at least 570,000 acres of land, extirpating the 
inhabitants, as the lands were all deemed to belong to the chief and 
therefore all inferior titles null. A president was sent to Munster and 
another to Connaught to execute the Queen's choice. With armed 
bands they scoured the country, as a few indisputable authorities 
will explain : each confiscation and destruction of foodstuffs pro- 
ducing famine and pestilence. 

"As they went, they drove the whole country before them into 
the Ventrie, and by that means they preyed and took all the cattle 
in the country, to the number of 8,000 kine, besides horses, garrons, 
sheep and goats ; and all such people as they met they did without 
mercy put to the sword ; by these means the whole country having 
no cattle or kine left, they were driven to such extremities that for 
want of victuals they were either to die and perish for famine or 
die under the sword. ... By means of the continual perse- 
cuting of the rebels, who could have no breath nor rest to releave 
themselves, but were alwaies by one garrison or other hurt or pur- 
sued ; and by reason the harvest was taken from them, their cattells 
in great numbers preied upon, and the whole countrie spoiled and 
preied ; the poore people, who lived onlie upon their labors, and fed 
by their milch cowes, were so distressed, that they would follow after 
the goods which were taken from them, and of^er themselves, their 
wives, and children, rather to be slaine by the armie, than to suffer 
the famine wherewith they were now pinched : " Hollinshed, VI. 33 
and 427. 



42 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

"The President having received certaine information, that the 
Munster fugatives were harboured in those spots, having before 
burned all the houses and corne, and taken great preyes in Ovvny 
Onubrian and Kilquig, a strong and fast countray, nor farre from 
Limerick, diverted his forces East into Clanwilliam and Muskerry- 
quirke, where Pierce Lacey had lately been succoured ; and harrass- 
ing the country, killed all mankind that were found therein, for a 
terrour to those as should give releefe to the runagate traitors. 
Thence we came to Arleagh woods, where we did the like, not leav- 
ing behind us man or beast, corne or cattle, except such as had been 
conveyed into castles. . . . They wasted and forraged the coun- 
try, so as in a small time it was not able to give the rebells any re- 
liefs ; having spoiled and brought into their garrisons the most part 
of their corne, being newly reaped. The next morning Sir Charles 
(Wilmot) coming to seek the enemy in their camp, he entered into 
their quarter without resistance, and where he found nothing but 
hurt and sick men, whose pains and lives by the soldiers were both 
determined" ; Sir George Carew, Pacata Hibernia, 189, 584. 

"No spectacle was more frequent in the ditches of the towns and 
especially in wasted countries, than to see multitudes of these poor 
people, the Irish, dead, with their mouths colored green by eating 
nettles, docks, and all things they could rend above ground : " Fynes 
Moryson. 

"Notwithstanding the same (Munster) was a most rich and plen- 
tiful countrey, full of corne and cattle, yet ere one year and a halfe 
they were brought to such wretchedness as that any stony harte 
would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and 
glynnes they came creeping forth upon their hands for their legges 
could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake 
like ghosts crying out of their graves ; they did eat the dead carrions, 
happy where they could find them, yea and one another soon after ; 
insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their 
graves; and if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, 
there they flocked as to a feast for the time ; that in short space of 
time there were none almost left, and a most populous and plenti- 
full countrey suddainely left voide of man and beast : " Edmund 
Spenser. 

So, at once, Ireland's manpower and the feasibility of extirpating 
the nation were being tested. 

"The English nation were shuddering over the atrocities of the 
Duke of Alva. The children in the nurseries were being inflamed 
to patriotic rage and madness by tales of Spanish tyranny. Yet 
Alva's bloody sword never touched the young, the defenceless, those 
7vhosc sex even dogs can recognize and respect. Sir Peter Carew 
had been murdering women, and children, and babies that had 
scarcely left the breast. . . . Gilbert, who was left in charge 
at Kilmallock, was illustrating yet more signally the same ten- 



MANPOWER 43 

dency. . . . He regarded himself as dealing rather with savage 
beasts than with human beings ; and when he tracked them to their 
dens he strangled the cubs and rooted out their entire broods. 
. . . Gilbert's method of treatment has this disadvantage, that 
it must be carried out to the last extremity, or it ought not be tried 
at all. The dead do not come back; and if the mothers and babies 
are slaughtered with the men, the race gives no further trouble. But 
the work must be done thoroughly. Partial and fitful cruelty lays 
up only a long debt of deserved and ever-deepening hate. . . . 
In justice to the English soldiers, however, it must be said that it 
was no fault of theirs if any Irish child of that generation was al- 
lowed to live to manhood. . . . The inference is but too natural 
that work of this kind was the road to preferment, and that this, 
or something like it, was the ordinary employmnet of the Saxon 
garrison in Ireland : " Froude, History of England, X., 508, 512. 

As regards Connaught. Malby, the President of that province, 
made a report in 1576, from which Mr. Froude quotes thus: "At 
Christmas I marched into their territory, and finding courteous 
dealing with them, had like to have cut my throat. I thought good 
to take another course, and so, with determination to consume them 
by tire and szvord, sparing neither old nor young, I entered their 
mountains. I burned all their corn and houses, and committed to 
the sword all that could be found, where were slain at that time 
above sixty of their best men, and among them the best leaders they 
had. This was Shan Burke's country. Then I burned Ulick Burke's 
country. In like manner I assaulted a castle where the garrison sur- 
rendered. I put them to the misericordia of my soldiers. They were 
all slain. Thence I went on, sparing none which came in my way, 
which did so amaze their followers that they could not tell where 
to bestow themselves. Shan Burke made means to me to pardon 
him, and forbear killing of his people. I would not hearken, but 
went on my way. The gentlemen of Clanrickard came to me, I 
found it was but dallying to win time ; so I left Ulick as little corn 
and as few houses standing as I left his brother, and what people, 
was found had as little favour as the other had. It was all done in 
rain and frost and storm, journeys in such weather bringing them 
the sooner to submission. They are humble enough now, and will 
yield to any terms we like to ofifer them." 

Such was the policy of extermination in Connaught. Some years 
later Sir John Perrot effected what was called the "Composition 
of Connaught," all the settlements being called "godly." Henry 
Harvey, Secretary to Lord Deputy Essex, reports the latter as 
saying, "There exists but one weapon would avail here. It is 
famine ! famine ! Famine with the grisly face, the clattering bones, 
the hollow eyesockets. Famine which eats up, not the fighting men 
alone, but the women and the children, too, till there be not one 
of them left." 



44 IRELAND'S CASE EOR FREEDOM 

Ulster next. It was under the ungrateful Stuart that the policy 
of extermination reached a development till then unequalled in his- 
tory. The extermination of the whole Irish population, from the 
major part of Ulster and the plantation of this province with Eng- 
lish and Scottish settlers was a human tragedy on an enormous 
scale and of consequences affecting the whole course of subsequent 
British and Irish history. Carried out under the first of the Stuart 
kings of England, whom as a prince of royal Gaelic race the Irish 
desired to accept as their king, it had in it an element of peculiar 
ingratitude. One of James's motives for it was to obtain money 
for the land from wealthy citizens of London to enable him to live 
extravagantly. It was, however, destined, though without the help 
of the Irish, and indeed in spite of them, to bring its own retribu- 
tion before the end of the century by turning the balance against the 
Stuart dynasty at two critical moments, costing Charles I his head, 
James II his throne, and the Irish nation sacrifices of life and prop- 
erty to the verge of extinction. A single quotation will sufficiently 
illustrate the working of tlie policy of extermination in Ulster. It 
is from a letter written by Lord Deputy Chichester toward the end 
of 1607 : "I have often said and written, it is famine that must con- 
sume the Irish ; as our swords and other endeavors worketh not 
that speedy effect which is expected. Hunger would be a better, 
because a speedier, weapon to employ against them than the sword. 
. . . I burned all along the Lough (Neagh) within four miles 
of Dungannon, and killed 100 people, sparing none, of what quality, 
age or sex soever, besides many burned to death. He killed man. 
woman, and child, horse, beast, and whatsoever we could find." 
Godkin, Land War. 

At first extermination in Ulster comprised the territories now 
known as the counties of Donegal, Derry, Tyrone, most of Armagh, 
and part of Alonaghan. Cavan and Fermanagh were subsequently 
added; all amounting to about 3,683,000 acres. Antrim and Down 
did not come into this scheme ; immigrants from Scotland, most of 
them of Gaelic race and speech, but of the new religion, having 
otherwise planted themselves in those counties at an earlier date. 
Of the confiscated lands, 1,141,000 acres were allotted to the under- 
takers, Scotch and English, who were all bound by their grants not 
to retain any Irish tenants on the lands ; 366,800 acres to the London 
companies; 350,000 acres to the servitors, that is, persons in the 
military, civil or other service of the Crown. Grants to corporate 
towns. Trinity College. Dublin, churches and schools; and rem- 
nants of inferior land, bogs, swamps and barren hills left for special 
reasons to a small number of the Irish, absorbed the remainder. Per- 
manent commissions were set up, ostensibly for plausible purposes, 
such as protection of Crown property, i. c, confiscated property, 
enforcing laws against church and monastic lands ; seeing that no 
new confiscations were made without attainder and inquisition; 



MANPOWER 45 

remedying defective titles ; receiving surrenders and making new 
grants, and so on. But the real purpose of those commissions was 
to promote the policy of extermination, not alone in doomed areas 
like Ulster, but over the entire country, as we shall see. Another 
cognate institution was the Court of Wards, whose function was 
to have the infant sons of Catholic land owners in certain cases 
seized, kidnapped, sent to England, brought up as Protestants and 
when they had reached manhood brought back to Ireland to work 
England's purposes against their own relatives, and in various ways. 

How did Leinster fare? In 1G09 the land owners of North Wex- 
ford innocently allowed themselves to be induced by a panic or- 
ganized for the purpose to surrender their lands to the commission 
for the remedy of defective titles, and asked to have the lands re- 
granted to them. The surrenders were officially accepted in 1610. 
Before any re-grants were made, lo, a hitherto unknown title of the 
King of England to the entire district was faked or "discovered." 
Before the end of that year an order came that the lands were the 
King's property, and should be granted, not to their Irish owners, 
but to two Englishmen — Sir Edward Fisher and Sir Lawrence Es- 
mond. The owners, having surrendered their titles, were helpless. 
After a long and bitter struggle, a compromise was arranged between 
the owners and the two strangers. But the confiscation was widened 
beyond their requirements. Of the owners, those who were old 
English, that is, colonists born in Ireland, got, as usual, more and 
better land than the old Irish. By this transaction about 100,000 
acres of arable land with appurtenant mountain land not measured, 
were wholly cleared of Irish and planted with English settlers. Many 
of the old Irish owners were driven out altogether; all that re- 
mained were on greatly reduced areas, some being reduced to the 
status of tenants-at-will, cottiers, and laborers. We are gravely 
told, that after this the Irish lost all confidence in English justice. 
Apparently slow to lose it, they are slower to recover it, not having 
been yet given any reason for doing so. 

The Wexford method of confiscation was followed in Ely O'Car- 
roll and Annaly, and in every county in Leinster except Wicklow. 
Wicklow's turn was, however, at hand. The same method was 
followed in County Leitrim, which the English always coupled with 
Meath, because the King of Brefifni-O'Rourke had been King of 
Meath also at the time of Henry II. Ormond and other parts of 
Munster not yet confiscated were next dealt with on the North Wex- 
ford plan. A national efi:ort at resistance was avoided by taking 
the country in districts and "znthout any shoiv that such a thing 
xvas meant." 

In the case of the confiscation in Connaught under Charles I, 
"his Deputy — Thomas Wenthworth, Earl of Strafiford — bribed the 
judges of the Court of Claims with a percentage for themeslves of 
the area of estates he wanted them to declare forfeited. W^e are 



46 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM' 

told that "The estates were found by local juries to have been for- 
feited." Of course they were. Little wonder, seeing that jurors 
who refused to produce the verdict that Strafford desired were 
fined 4,000 pounds each, their estates seized until the fine was paid, 
and they had in addition to acknowledge their offence in public 
court on bended knees. Little wonder they found agreeable verdicts 
when the lawyers who had in the earlier cases defended the owners 
were tendered the Oath of Supremacy, and on their refusal as Catho- 
lics to take it were turned out of court and allowed to plead no 
more. Thus the owners attacked, knowing nothing of English 
law and little of the English language, were left without legal as- 
sistance. On Strafford's subsequent impeachment in London, one of 
the counts in the indictment was, "That jurors who gave their ver- 
dict according to their consciences were censured in the Castle 
Chamber in great fines, sometimes pilloried, with loss of ears, and 
bored through the tongue ; and sometimes marked in the forehead 
with infamous punishments." The thieves quarrelled in England, 
but the thieving went on in Ireland unabated. Strafford practised 
his system, in Connaught. Clare, Limerick and Tipperary. 

The composition of Connaught carried out by Sir John Perrot 
in 1585 comprised the granting of English titles to the land owners. 
In 1641 Lords Justices ruled that all the titles to land given by 
Perrot were invalid. Thus again was opened up another extensive 
field for legal chicanery, the imposition of new fines for titles, con- 
fiscation of the most desirable lands and endless corruption and 
misery. 

Every confiscation involved an infinity of human suffering among 
high and low, and absolute starvation and death among the working 
farmers and poor generally. If to kill be more merciful than to 
keep alive for the purpose of torture, then Cromwell was more mer- 
ciful as well as more logical than his predecessors in aiming without 
disguise at the utter destruction of the Irish nation. There is no 
doubt now that this was his aim, and that he was prevented from 
carrying it to completion by the magnitude of the task being greater 
than he as an Englishman had previously realized, beyond what his 
resources enabled him to do. and also by some regard for certain 
Catholic States from which he expected to derive some advantages. 
Though falling short of his purpose of completing the extermination 
Cromwell's was the most extensive and heartless campaign of the 
whole series, never approached in brutality anywhere before or since. 
Like the campaign under Elizabeth, it swept over three provinces, 
and more ruthlessly. It was not war, but broadcast murder. His 
soldiers were a band of hungry murderers let loose on the country, 
robbhig for their living in lieu of pay, murdering men, especially 
priests and monks ; outraging women and girls whose food they had 
eaten, then murdering the women and children ; tossing babies in 
the air and catching them on the points of their swords in the pres- 



MANPOWER 47 

ence of their mothers, in pursuance of a hint given by Cromwell 
himself that "nits will be lice." They were answerable to no author- 
ity whatever. 

In August, 1652, before the Cromwellian massacres were fully 
ended, the English Roundhead Parliament passed the "Act for the 
Settlement of Ireland," the most murderous measure that ever 
emanated from a legislature. It divided the whole population into 
classes, and meted out specific punishment to all those classes, ex- 
cept only such persons as could prove that they had Ijeen constantly 
faithful to the interests of England as represented by the parliament. 
Want of fidelity to the parliament was the off ence. As practically 
the whole nation. Catholic and Protestant, had at some time of the 
war fought for the king against the parliament, especially owing 
to the revulsion of feeling caused by the execution of Qiarles I, 
scarcely any person in Ireland was in a position to prove constant 
fidelity to the parliament. To overcome this difficulty, the ordinary 
course of law was reversed. Every person in Ireland was held to be 
guilty and to have forfeited life or property, or both, according to 
the category to which he belonged, unless he proved his innocence. 
This is the special note which distinguishes the Cromwellian con- 
fiscation from all others. Amongst the persons excepted from par- 
don, that is, condemned to death by the statute, were all priests, 
secular and regular. Under this it is acknowledged that three 
bishops and rnore than 300 priests were massacred, in addition to< all 
the casual murders committed by the troops during the war. All 
was done in the name of God and religion. It was, as Carte the his- 
torian says, "extermination preached by gospel." An English 
authority estimates that the sections 1 and 4 of the Act condemned 
to death about 100,000 Irishmen. The women and children mur- 
dered were treated as negligible and not counted. "Sir William 
Cole, ancestor to Lord Enniskillen, proudly boasted of his achieve- 
ment in having 7,000 of the 'rebels' famished to death within a cir- 
cuit of a few miles of his garrison : " Godkin, Land War. 

There was a final provision in the Act that any person who on 
any ground had been spared his life might be transported to wher- 
ever the government pleased. This was the authority for extermi- 
nating the people and confiscating their property and planting Eng- 
lish settlers thereon. In September, 1653, the scheme was finally 
settled. The river Shannon was made the boundary between 
Catholic and Protestant Ireland, with the view that the land to 
the west being largely barren or poorer than that to the east 
and famine and plague being then prevalent in all poor parts of the 
country from the previous ten years of war, the excess population 
thrown onto the west should soon die of want and their unburied 
.corpses would not ofTend the English planted on the lands thus 
cleared of their owners. As a result of the long withdrawal of 
labor from agriculture and other industries during war, the country 



48 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

was little better than a wilderness. Though the actual residents in 
Connaught and Clare were subject to the same inquisitions and 
transplantations as elsewhere, the operation in their case consisted 
largely in contracting the area of their lands in order to create 
spaces of refuge for the dispossessed. Thus was created the con- 
gestion in the west of Ireland of which we have heard so much from 
that time to the present. The governor and commissioners were 
directed by the statute to publish and proclaim "this present decla- 
ration" that "all the ancient estates and farms of the people of Ire- 
land were to belong to the adventurers and the army of England, 
and that the parliament had assigned Connaught for the habitation 
of the Irish nation, whither they must transplant, with their wives 
and daughters and children before the 1st May following (1654), 
under penalty of death if found on this side of the Shannon after 
that day." Prendergast, Croymvellian Settlement. Any Catholic 
found east of the Shannon after that day might be shot at sight 
by any Englishman, without trial whatsoever. It having been found 
impossible to have the country cleared by that date, Protestants 
were allowed wherever they had reason to think any money remained 
among the Catholics to extract it from them by compounding, and 
then as soon as the Catholics were fully stripped of means, their 
lives were spared, but they were banished beyond the Shannon. 

As usual in such cases, the Act was not uniformly worked. The 
Catholic land owners, large and small, were expelled from all coun- 
ties; but there was a difference in the treatment of the clansmen 
become tenants. As a rule these were cleared ofif only the fertile 
lands. If they burrowed homes for themselves in the bogs and 
barren hills, they were not deemed worth killing; and besides, the 
new owners would be able to extract money from them indefinitely 
as rent of land on which no Englishman would live, and the poor 
wretches would be convenient for agricultural labor without pay 
except scraps of coarse food. The more fertile parts of Tipperary 
and Kerry were wholly cleared of Irish, rich and poor. All the 
grantees were bound to plant a certain number of British Protestant 
families on the lands granted to them. These plantations were 
always made on superior land, and can be pointed out in all parts of 
the country to the present day. Of some 10,000 Catholic land own- 
ers in Ireland at the beginning of the war, all but twenty-six were 
deprived completely of their land, and themselves and their children 
ruined by being driven either beyond the Shannon or out of the 
country altogether, or to poverty and the grave. There were actually 
transplanted beyond the Shannon 1,200 of them with their families, 
and it is estimated about 40,000 other dependents. The rest of the 
population who had not fallen in the war were disposed of in char- 
acteristic ways. Some 40,000 Irish soldiers, on surrendering in 
utter want of food, were allowed to enter any foreign service they 
chose, and foreign vessels were in the harbors to take them away, 



MANPOWER 49 

some to France, some to Spain, some to Austria, some to Venice, 
some to Sweden. Bands of soldiers were sent all over the country, 
not to slay this time, but to collect children and youths for sale 
through Bristol merchants to slave-owners in Barbadoes, Jamaica, 
and the colony of Virginia; the girls for a worse fate. It was 
found that 25 pounds each could be obtained for them, and Crom- 
well's government was in need of money. By all the various meth- 
ods the population was. under Cromwell, reduced to one-third. At 
the end, more than 30,000 Irish, apart from soldiers, were known 
to be wandering homeless in various countries of Europe. 

The total area confiscated is estimated at 8.000,000 acres. Crom- 
well's officers and men were given grants of land in lieu of pay, 
which was long in arrears. First, lots were drawn as to the prov- 
inces in which they were to get the land ; next as to the counties. 
Contractors and others who had catered for the army and had not 
been paid; adventurers who had lent money for the support of the 
army as a speculation, and all who were willing to advance money 
to the government or its representatives, all these were rewarded 
with Irish land. The regicides, that is those who had been useful in 
connection with the execution of Charles I, seventy in number, were 
rewarded with twenty thousand (20,000) acres of the best land in 
Ireland, chiefly in Tipperary. 

In 1641 the value of the cattle and stock in Ireland was estimated 
at 4,000,000 pounds, and in 1652 they were estimated at only 500,- 
000 pounds. If, as is now generally admitted, its people are a coun- 
try's truest wealth, who can estimate the gross loss inflicted upon 
Ireland by Cromwell? Still, the extermination of a nation, espe- 
cially of an intensely home-loving nation, proved a vast enterprise. 
By means accountable only by their strong attachment to home, 
the people found their way back to their respective districts as near 
as they could with safety approach to their old homes. 

On the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in the person of 
Charles II, from whom the Irish Catholics had deserved and ex- 
pected much, that king, under the guidance largely of the Duke of 
Ormond, confirmed most of the Cromwellian titles to land in Ireland. 
In one of his proclamations he went so far as to describe as "rebels" 
the Irish who had fought for him against Cromwell. As Lord Chan- 
cellor Eustace said in a letter to Ormond, "Those who fought against 
his majesty are to have the estates of those who fought for him." 
This ungrateful policy was carried out under the Act of Settlement 
and Explanation. It is true that Charles issued many letters, as he 
was then legally entitled to do, ordering the restoration of individuals 
to their estates, and sometimes of corporations, as those of Cork 
and Galway, in accordance with treaties and solemn agreements en- 
tered into with his father before the outbreak of the war; but his 
letters were disregarded by the Cromwellians in possession of the 
lands and in possession of arms to defend them, of the garrisons 



50 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

and of the entire machinery of government in Ireland. Charles had 
got enough of exile to spoil his taste for more of it. In response 
to numerous appeals, irresistible if logic or justice counted, he ap- 
pointed a commission in 1661 to examine claims. The negative re- 
sult can easily be guessed when we add that of its 36 members, every 
one was in possession of land taken from the Irish. The Crom- 
wellians made plain to all concerned their intention to hold all they 
had got, and the king was in no position to deal with them, even 
if inclined. A plot to seize Dublin Castle and overthrow the gov- 
ernment gave him to understand what he might expect if he went 
further. He turned his attention to pleasanter matters and no one 
was punished for the plot. "Not 100 of the Irish nobles at this day 
possess as much land as he could be buried in, though they expect 
it in this year, 1660"; so wrote Dugald MacFirbis. Vain was the 
expectation ; and this neither from lack of land nor from lack of 
rightful claimants. Notwithstanding the voracious grabbing, a con- 
siderable amount of land remained in the hands of the govern- 
ment officials not finally disposed of, and many of the outcast own- 
ers would have been glad to take small portions compared with their 
former estates. But Charles found other use for it. He made a 
present of 100.000 acres to the Duke of Ormond, in addition to the 
extensive territory which he. as a Protestant and trimmer, had been 
able to retain. Over 170.000 acres still remained, the final remnant 
of property lost through fidelity to the Stuart cause. Instead of dis- 
tributing even this among the outcast owners, the Stuart king had 
the meanness to concur in the grant of it to his own brother, the 
Duke of York, afterwards James II. thus making him a Cromwellian 
planter, the lowest degradation to which a Stuart could fall. It is 
due to James to say that when he came to Ireland in 1689 he did 
what he could in the short time left him to restore those lands to 
their original owners. The lands were, however, almost imme- 
diately confiscated again by William III, together with other lands, 
amounting in all to nearly 2,000,000 acres. He, of his goodness, 
made a present of 95,000 acres to his favorite mistress, Mrs. Eliza- 
beth Villiers, Countess of Orkney. 

The landlordism resulting from all this shuffling of human beings 
was such a product of iniquity as has never been equalled in any 
country for the scope and degree of absolute and irresponsible power 
placed in the hands of the new land-owning class, a class least of all 
mankind fitted for irresponsible power, the thorough use they made 
of their power, as though they were not dealing with human beings, 
and the utter degradation and misery of their Catholic peasant vic- 
tims. Excepting the Protestants of Ulster, who were insisting 
upon rights which subsequently came to be recognized as the Ulster 
Custom, the entire rural population of Ireland was reduced to the 
lowest conceivable form of servitude. As the wildest animal, 
wounded and broken, struggles back, even in face of danger, to its 



MANPOWER 51 

original home, on any terms or without terms, so did many of the 
unfortunate Irish, having- no means to take them anywhere else. The 
hierarchy of new landlords were all English Protestants, the larger 
of them being Absentees. Four times the colonial parliament en- 
acted an Absentee Tax upon English grantees of Irish lands, who 
were well pleased to receive rents from Ireland, but preferred to 
spend them in their own country. These taxes were so successfully 
evaded that there was no substantial yield of revenue from them ; 
and though Englishmen cried out against certain penalties they 
threatened, no grantee lost his land under them. Of those new land- 
lords who resided in Ireland, in the eighteenth century, this is a de- 
scription by Mr. Froude, the English historian: "The gentry hated 
labor. Everyone who could subsist in idleness set himself up for a 
gentleman. Everyone who held a farm that he could divide or sub- 
let became a landlord and lived on his rents. The land was let, and 
under-let. and under-let again, till six rents had sometimes to be 
provided by the actual cultivator before he was allowed to feed him- 
self and his family, whilst the proprietor and quasi-proprietor grew 
into the Irish blackguard, the racing, drinking, duelling, swearing 
squireen, the tyrant of the fair, the shame and scandal of the order 
to which he affected to belong." A strange contrast, this "godly" 
system, with the "barbarous" system administered by the brehons. 
Mr. Froude proceeds : "The English deliberately determined to keep 
Ireland poor and miserable as the readiest means of preventing it 
becoming troublesome. They destroyed Irish trade and shipping by 
navigation laws. They extinguished Irish manufacture by differential 
duties. They laid disabilities even on its wretched agriculture, for fear 
that Irish importations might injure the English farmers. The people, 
retaining their tribal traditions, believed they had rights upon the 
land on which they lived. The owner believed that there were no 
rights but his own. In England the rights of landlords have sim- 
ilarly survived their duties, but they have been modified by custom 
or public opinion. In Ireland the proprietor was an alien with the 
fortunes of the residents upon his estates in his hands and at his 
mercy. He was divided from them in creed and language ; he de- 
spised them as of an inferior race, and he acknowledged no interest 
in common with them. Had he been allowed to trample on them 
and make them his slaves, he would have cared for them, perhaps, 
as he cared for his horses. But their persons were free, while their 
farms and houses were his, and thus his only object was to wring 
out of them the last penny which they could pay, leaving them and 
their children to a life scarcely raised above the level of their otim 
pigs:" Romanism and the Irish Race, p. 36. 

Evictions, destitution, famine and the diseases that accompany 
famine followed every confiscation and every instance of economic 
pressure caused by hostile legislation. The first artificial famine 
produced by English law in Ireland was when Elizabeth's soldiers 



52 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

devastated Munster and Connaught, wantonly burning the corn in 
the fields and haggard, and killing the cattle as well as the people. 
James, the two Charles's, Cromv/ell, William III, the Georges and 
Victoria have followed Elizabeth's example in the policy of ex- 
termination, if not by the sword, by the baser and more horrible 
means of State-created famine and plague. The legislation of 
1699, which destroyed the woolen industry and left people without 
employment and the country without money, was followed by 
famine lasting continuously in many parts of the country for fully 
sixty years, covering the whole country periodically owing to bad 
harvests consequent on the inferiority of the tillage the people were 
able to practise, and carrying away immense numbers of victims in 
1726-27, 1740-41 and 1761-62. "Of that famine— the famine of 
1740-41 — we have many contemporaneous descriptions. Accord- 
ing to one writer, 400,000 persons died. Bishop Berkeley has left 
touching descriptions of the misery that came before his own eyes 
and smote his loving heart ; and another writer gives a picture as 
terrible as any even in the history of famines : T have seen.' says 
this writer, 'the laborer endeavoring to work at his spade, but 
fainting from want of food, and forced to quit it. I have seen 
the aged father eating grass like a beast, and in the anguish of his 
soul wishing for his dissolution. I have seen the helpless orphan 
exposed on the dung heap, and none to take him in for fear of 
infection, and I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the breast 
of the already expired parent:'" Lecky, Eighteenth Century II, 
218, 219. 

There was a continuous stream of emigration of as many of the 
poor as could scrape together the passage money to banish them- 
selves. Throughout the eighteenth century we read casual remarks 
about numerous deaths from famine ; while the government, whether 
it was in London or in Dublin, having put the rent-extracting and 
exterminating machinery in operation, occasionally by statute in- 
creased the machine's efficiency, abused the Irish for being still 
alive and went its way absolutely heedless, until at last the whole 
civilized world was shocked at the wanton destruction of a whole 
population by the most terrible of all deaths in 1846. 7 and 8. 
There was never any reason save criminal misgovernment why one 
of the most fertile countries in the world should be afflicted with 
want of food. 

In the 19th century, so long as the Napoleonic wars lasted, the 
prices of farm produce enabled Irish agriculturists to live, in spite 
of inflated rents; when peace came and prices fell, the inflated rents 
were no longer payable, eviction clearances and distress became 
general, and no year passed in which large numbers of the peas- 
antry did not die of famine. The report of an English Select Com- 
mittee in 1819 opens with the grim and significant statement that the 
general distress and want of employment "are so notorious as to 



MANPOWER 53 

render the production of any particular evidence to establish the 
extent and variety of the evil unnecessary." 

Another Select Committee in 1823 report the state of the country 
as "wretched and calamitous to the greatest degree." 

A similar commitee in 1824 reported that the numerous tenants, 
evicted and reduced to the status of laborers, could find no employ- 
ment, and that such laborers as found fairly constant work received 
not more than four pence or five pence a day. 

In 1830 a further committee reported that from one-fourth to 
one-fifth of the Irish population were without employment and were 
exposed to "misery and sufifering which no language can describe, 
and which it is necessary to witness in order to fully estimate." 
Even in those counties in Ulster where the linen industry was a 
general advantage and where Protestant tenants had the protection 
of the Ulster Custom in land tenure, agricultural laborers could 
not find employment for more than three days in a week. 

The French publicist Gustave de Beaumont, having visited Ireland 
in 1835 and 1837, wrote : "I have seen the Indian in his forest and 
the negro in his chains, and I thought that I beheld the lowest 
term of human misery ; but I did not then know the lot of Ireland. 
. . . Irish misery forms a type by itself, of which there exists 
nowhere else either model or imitation. In seeing it, one recognizes 
that no theoretical limits can be assigned to the misfortunes of na- 
tions." 

The report of the poor inquiry commission in 1836 says : "We 
cannot estimate the number of persons (heads of families) out 
of work and in distress during thirty weeks of the year at less 
than 585,000, nor the number of persons dependent on them at 
less than 1,800,000; making in all 2,385,000." The repeal of the 
English corn laws and the establishment of "free trade," while 
highly beneficial to industrial England, was ruinous to agricultural 
Ireland, checking her only considerable industry killing such other 
little industries as continued to linger in towns and intensifying the 
distress. At no season throughout those years had the Connaught 
peasantry sufficient food. The introduction of the degrading Eng- 
lish poor law system in 1838 accentuated the distress of the poor, 
classed state-created poverty as a crime, and ostensibly extended 
the cost of its maintenance to the landlord class. They, however, 
in some cases, successfully shifted their part of the burden to their 
tenants. 

On the 16th February, 1844, Mr. Disraeli (afterwards Lord 
Beaconsfield) said in the English House of Commons: "He wished 
to see a public man come forward and say what the Irish question 
was. Let them consider Ireland as they would any other country 
similarly circumstanced. They had a starving population, an ab- 
sentee aristocracy, an alien church, and the weakest executive in 
the world. This was the Irish question. Gentlemen would say 



54 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

at once on reading of a country in such a position the remedy is 
revolution — not the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. But 
the connection with England prevented revolution. Therefore Eng- 
land was logically in the position of being the cause of all the misery 
in Ireland. What, then, was the duty of an English Minister? 
To effect by his policy all the changes which a revolution would do 
by force :" Hansard, at date. 

In 1845 a royal commission known as the "Devon Commission" 
reported the rural distress intensified and extended to all ranks, as 
compared with the period of previous reports : "When we con- 
sider this state of things and the large proportion of the population 
which comes under the designation of agricultural laborers, we 
have to repeat that the patient endurance which they exhibit is 
deserving of high commendation, and entitles them to the best at- 
tention of the government and parliament. . . . Up to this 
period any improvement that may have taken place is attributable 
almost entirely to the habits of temperance in which they have so 
generally persevered, and not, we grieve to say, to any increased 
demand for their labor." "Government and Parliament," which 
would have attended promptly to a report of less gravity relating 
to their own people, turned a deaf ear to the Irish people, who were 
not their own, and whom it was their policy to exterminate. 

The Times, leading English newspaper, on 26th June, 1845, said : 
"The facts of Irish destitution are ridiculously simple. They are 
almost too commonplace to be told. The people have not enough 
to eat. They are suffering a real, though an artificial, famine. 
Nature does her duty. The land is fruitful enough. Nor can it 
be fairly said that man is wanting. The Irishman is disposed to 
work. In fact, man and nature together do produce abundantly. 
The island is full and overflowing with human food. But some- 
thing ever interposes between the hungry mouth and the ample 
banquet. The famished victim of a mysterious sentence stretches 
out his hand to the viands which his own industry has placed be- 
fore his eyes, but no sooner are they touched than they fly. A per- . 
petual decree of sic vos non vobis condems him to toil without en- 
joyment." 

Ireland's experience of State-produced famine, chronic and peri- 
odical, \vas about to be repeated on an unprecedented scale; and 
in the presence of all the official reports it could never have been 
pleaded that the guilty government was not aware of its coming. 
Mr. W^ E. Forster, a relief commissioner on behalf of the Society 
of Friends (afterwards Giief Secretary for Ireland), wrote from 
Cleggan, Connemara, on 22nd January, 1847: "Having heard an 
alarming account of this village. I had ordered two bags of meal 
to meet me. . . . The distress was appalling: far beyond my 
power of description. I was quickly surrounded by a mob of men 
and women, more like famished dogs than fellow creatures, whose 



MANPOWER 55 

figures, looks and cries all showed that they were suffering the 
ravening agony of hunger. ... I went into two or three 
cabins. In one there were two emaciated men lying at full length 
on the damp floor in their ragged clothes too weak to move — actually 
worn down to skin and bone. In another a young man lay ill of 
dysentery; his mother had pawned everything, even his shoes, to 
keep him alive, and I never shall forget the resigned, uncomplain- 
ing tone with which he told me that all the medicine he wanted was 
food." 

Mr. A. M. Sullivan, the eminent Irish publicist, wrote with 
reference to West Munster: "In our district it was a common 
occurrence to find on opening the front door in early morning, 
leaning against it the corpse of some victim who in the night had 
rested in its shelter. We raised a public subscription, and em- 
ployed two men with horse and cart to go around each day and 
gather up the dead." 

The Census Commissioners in their comments accompanying the 
vital statistics a few years later said : "No pen has recorded the 
numbers of the forlorn and starving who perished by the wayside 
or in the ditches, or of the mournful groups sometimes of whole 
families, who lay down and died one after another upon the floor 
of their miserable cabins, and so remained uncoflined and unburied 
till chance unveiled the appalling scene. . . . And yet, through 
all, the forbearance of the Irish peasantry and the calm submission 
with which they bore the deadliest ills that can fall on man can 
scarcely be paralleled in the annals of any people:" Official Census 
of Ir eland , 1851. 

Lord John Russell, Prime Minister, in the English House of 
Commons : "More than 50,000 families were in that year turned 
out of their wretched dwellings, without pity and without refuge. 
. . . We have made Ireland — I speak deliberately — we have 
made it the most degraded and the most miserable country in the 
world. . . . All the world is crying shame upon us, but we 
are equally callous to our ignominy and to the results of our mis- 
government." 

John Mitchel, commenting in the United Irishman of the 4th 
March, 1848, upon an inquest held on a family named Boland, who, 
though they tilled about twenty acres of land, had died of starva- 
tion. "Now what became of poor Boland's twenty acres of crops? 
Part of it went to Gibraltar, to victual the garrison ; part to South 
Africa, to provision the robber army ; part went to Spain, to pay 
for the landlord's wine ; part to London, to pay the interest of his 
honor's mortgage to the Jews. The English ate some of it, the 
Chinese had their share, the Jews and the Gentiles divided it amongst 
them; and there was none for Boland," 

John Mitchel, in his Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), said: 
"At the end of six years I can set 6y\\n these things calmly, but 



56 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

to see them might have driven a wise man mad. There is no need 
to recount how the assistant barristers and sheriffs, aided by the 
police, tore down the roof-trees and ploughed up the hearths of 
village after village. . . . how in some hamlets by the seaside, 
most of the inhabitants being already dead, an adventurous traveler 
would come upon some family eating a famished ass ; how maniac 
mothers stowed away their dead children to be devoured at mid- 
night . . . how families, when all was eaten and no hope left, 
took their last look at the sun, built up their cottage doors that 
none might see them die or hear their groans, and were found 
weeks afterwards skeletons on their own hearth." 

The eviction clearances which accompanied and followed the 
Great Famine are too appalling to be described here. Father La- 
velle estimates the number of houses leveled on the eviction of their 
owners in Ireland in the twenty years 1841 to 1861 at 270,000. 
This is certainly an under-estimate, but at five persons to a family 
it represents 1,350,000 persons left homeless. The official returns 
of evictions are considerably under the true number, because they 
include no cases of eviction but those carried out under the order 
of a court, whereas numerous evictions were carried out all over 
the country by mere notice to quit, or by landlord or agent in per- 
son without the intervention of any court. Evictions and emigra- 
tion from economic pressure continued on a large scale for more 
than thirty years after the Great Famine, and continued down 
to 1914 on a scale almost as large in proportion to the diminished 
population. 

The Great Famine in Queen Victoria's reign was, in terrible truth, 
the last great effort of the English Government to exterminate the 
Irish nation. We call this treating Ireland as a victim country, that 
is, worse than international law would allow an enemy countrv^ to 
be treated, because if England had treated the enemy country so 
badly, civilized States would have intervened to stop the barbarity. 
Thus it was that in the middle of the 19th century, in the reign of 
"Victoria the Good," the policy of extermination commended to 
and graciously adopted by Henry VIII of England three centuries 
before reached its highest development so far. It is now in opera- 
tion again in another form, and is certain to continue so long as 
our connection with England lasts. That the Irish race or nation 
exists at all today is a marvelous demonstration of its innate virtue 
over English brute force. Where was, where is, that cosmopolitan 
sympathy of which England boasts so much abroad, where she is 
not so well known? Does anyone still wonder that the Irish people 
even now fail to see the superiority of the English land system 
to that of ancient Ireland? Can anyone, on a survey of the whole, 
wonder that the Irish nation desires release once for all from a 
bondage so terrible? Anyone who still doubts that the governing 
purpose of the rule which produces these results was, and is, ex- 



MANPOWER 57 

termination of the Irish nation, may take, not an Irish opinion, 
but that of the Times newspaper in 1863 : "The Celt goes to yield 
to the Saxon. This land of IGO harbors, with its fertile soil, its 
noble rivers and beautiful lakes, with fertile mines and riches of 
every kind, is being cleared quietly for the interest and luxury of 
humanity." The Saturday Review of 28th November, 1863, gloats 
over what it deems the delightful fact that "silence reigns over the 
vast solitude of Ireland." 

Arthur Young, an English social economist, states in his Tour of 
Ireland, after a close study of the country from end to end at its 
very worst period in the 18th centur)% that owing to the fertility 
of the soil, its minerals and other resources, its inland fisheries, its 
natural facilities for seafaring and trade, its numerous other 
properties and conditions and the character of its people, Ireland 
was capable of supporting in comfort a population of 100,000,000. 
This is a large estimate, and cannot be adequately discussed here. 
But there is little difference of opinion among competent economists 
that under its own government Ireland would be self-supporting 
with a population of 30,000,000. That happens to be about the 
number of the Irish race at the present time. Unfortunately: ow- 
ing to English rule, owang especially to the policy of extermination, 
not quite one-seventh of that number are now in Ireland. Some 
20.000,000 of our race are in America, North and South ; 6.000.000 
scattered in other parts of the world, and a remnant of little more 
than 4,000,000 cling on to the home of the race. Even these are 
being attacked by England as these words are being w^ritten. Any 
impartial reader of this section wnll admit that the existence of the 
Irish race in such numbers today is a marvelous demonstration of 
manpower. 



VI. 

Ireland is Apt for Industries and Trade as an Independent State. 

As in the other departments, Ireland's aptitude for industries and 
trade is most convincingly illustrated by the number and character 
of the measures found necessary in order to incapacitate Ireland. 
These we now proceed to set forth : 

The Cattle Trade. Some of the Catholic land-owners, deprived 
of their property as just described, and not fit or disposed or per- 
sonally free to enter foreign military service, thought they might 
be able to make a living by engaging in the cattle and provision 
trades, which Ireland, when independent, had always carried on. 
The English king and parliament had occasionally enacted laws 
hostile to Irish commerce when Ireland was independent and able 
to disregard them. But the first operative English statute gravely 
hostile to Irish trade, and consequently to her manufactures, was 
the Cattle and Navigation Act of 1663. This Act was deplored 
by the most farseeing of the Anglo-Irish, who, having their homes 
and permanent interests in Ireland were affected themselves by the 
country being deprived of the only source of prosperity then avail- 
able. 

After a century of continuous turmoil and the expropriation of* 
the entire nation, there can scarcely have been any manufactured 
products to export. Live stock and raw materials were the only 
remaining wealth. The penalty the Act imposed for sending large 
cattle into England was forty shillings a head, and for sheep ten 
shillings a head ; penalties approximately the value of the animals, 
money being scarce then. The Act therefore amounted to absolute 
prohii3ition. Nevertheless, a Second Cattle Act was passed in 1666, 
still further restricting Ireland's freedom of trade. While the bill 
was being discussed in the House of Lords, one of the lords opposing 
it gave expression to the universal and eternal truism that Ireland, 
if it had the power, would be as much entitled to desire the king 
to restrain the trade of England. Obvious as that truism is, scarcely 
one in a million of Englishmen has at any time had, or has today, 
the honesty to acknowledge it. That solitary ray of truth had no 
effect on the progress or content of the bill, which became law in 
mechanical order and was followed by numerous other Acts, and by 
Orders in Council having the force of Acts, prohibiting expressly 
or in effect the importation into England of Irish cattle, sheep, 
swine, beef, mutton, bacon, pork, butter and cheese — almost all the 
that Ireland could then spare for export. The statutes and orders 
of those vears and of 1670 and 71 treated Ireland more severely 



APTITUDE FOR INDUSTRIES 59 

"than a foreign neutral country; in some respects more severely than 
an enemy country; in short, as a victim country. The direct result 
of this legislation was to leave on the hands of the Irish farmers 
live stock which there was nobody to buy ; to stop the normal course 
of breeding stock ; to reduce the value of horses so that many were 
killed for dog meat ; to spread among the poor in cities as well as 
in the country distress and disease, and to force Ireland into sheep 
farming and the development of a woolen industry — the fate of 
which we shall consider later. For the present, Ireland was pre- 
vented from exporting wool to any country except England, and 
allowed to export it to England on payment of prohibitive duties. 
Thus held in a vise, prevented from exporting cattle, sheep and 
wool, she was forced to expand as much as possible the trade of 
exporting dead meat and other food stufifs and hides as the only 
available means of obtaining money, and this trade necessarily 
took time to develop. 

The Provision Trade. In the IMiddle Ages, for the reasons a^l- 
ready stated, there was more mixed continental intercourse with 
Ireland than with England, both imports and exports comprising 
a wide range of articles ; but no international commerce on the 
modern scale. Ireland's modern trade in provisions began as soon 
as the country was settled after the Cromwellian confiscation and 
the stoppage of the trade in cattle and wool ; and in the 18th century 
it became their biggest trade. War or commercial conflict between 
England and continental countries frequently limited the ports in 
which Ireland could find a market for her produce, and the market 
was sometimes such as failed to cover the orisrinal cost and the 
transport charges. The fact is on record that in 1675 Irish beef 
was selling in Holland and Zealand at a penny a potmd. Ireland 
became so well known as a source of cheap foodstuffs for the pur- 
pose of raising money to meet the new imposts that the French 
and Dutch, and even the English, were able to victual their ships 
at Irish ports more cheaply than at English. That the trade in 
foodstuffs did not, under English rule, include corn, as in the time 
of Ireland's independence, was a consequence of the confiscations 
and Penal Code, which had transferred from the original owners 
all or the best parts of their lands to men who, perhaps imcertain 
how long their new titles might endure, used the lands in pasture, 
the easiest use without labor. This tendency to grazing in substi- 
tution for tillage was also encouraged by a resolution adopted in 
1735 by the colonial House of Commons at the bidding of the Eng- 
lish Government, exempting all pasture lands from tithe. Tithes 
were very onerous whenever and wherever English rule extended 
in Ireland. The more land was relieved from tithe bv being let 
out in pasture, the heavier the tithe became on the tilled lands, be- 
cause thev had then to bear the gross amount for the whole parish. 
The relief was for the wealthv Protestants and absentees ; the 



60 IRELAXD'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

burden for the working farmers, especially the Catholics, who oc- 
cupied the least fertile of the lands. On this, Lecky, pro-English 
historian, says : "Tithes, in their original theory, are not absolute 
property, but property assigned in trust for the discharge of cer- 
tain public duties. In Ireland, when they were not appropriated 
by laymen, they were paid by an impoverished Catholic peasantry 
to a clergy who were opposed to their religion, and usually not 
even resident among them ; and they were paid in such a manner 
that the heaviest burden lay on the very class who were least able 
to bear it. It was a common thing for a parish to consist of some 
4,000 or 5,000 acres of rich pasture land held by a prosperous 
grazier who had been rapidly amassing a large fortune through the 
increased price of cattle, and of 300 or 400 acres of inferior land 
occupied by a crowd of miserable cottiers. In accordance with the 
vote of the Colonial House of Commons, the former was exempt 
from the burden, which was thrown on the latter." Furthermore, 
England during a great part of the 18th century granted bounties on 
the export of corn from England, and in effect prohibited the im- 
portation of corn. These combined causes made tillage unprofitable 
in Ireland, killed agriculture, turned immense areas of the country 
into pasture, and forced emigration, with numerous evictions, famine 
and plague, among those unable from want of money to emigrate. 
Any Catholics who still had means enabling them to take farms of 
considerable size were precluded from tilling by the same causes 
and the additional reason that, after the Cromwellian '"Settlement" 
they could not feel secure in land, were prevented by statute from 
taking leases except for short periods and subject to conditions 
which did not justify tilling, and which placed them at the mercy 
of any informer. As Lecky says: "Real enterprise and industry 
amongst the Catholic tenants was destroyed by the law which placed 
strict bounds to their progress by providing that, if their profits 
exceeded one-third of the rent, the first Protestant who proved 
the fact might take their farm." This forced such Catholics into 
the provision trade, and accounts for the large extent to which that 
^trade was in their hands. The Atlantic trade, with the "planta- 
ftions" (as the American colonies were then called) and the West 
Indies was the most profitable in which the Irish were able to en- 
gage, because of the facility of disposing of cargoes at good prices 
and getting saleable cargoes for the homeward voyage. Prosperity 
from this, as from every other source, was of short duration ; for 
the sufficient reason that England could not endure that Ireland 
should become prosperous from any cause. Accordingly, an elabo- 
rate series of English statutes followed in sustained succession, com- 
pleting each other in every conceivable detail, with the object of 
clearing Irish ships off the Atlantic and out of existence. See, for 
example. 22 and 23 Charles II. c. 26 ; 3 and 4 Anne, c. 5 ; 3 and 4 
Anne, c. 10; 8 Geo. I, c. 15: Geo. I. c. 18 : 2 Geo. TT, c. 28. These 



APTITUDE FOR INDUSTRIES 61 

Acts enumerated every product of the Plantations and West Indies 
for which there was a home market, and prohibited Irish ships from 
importing them, except to England. They might then be shipped 
to Ireland. This would involve an additional expenditure of a 
quarter of the cost of the long voyage, double insurance, double 
commission, double port dues and double fees — amounting to a loss 
on the transaction. Some of the Acts also prohibited the exporta- 
tion of Irish products to the Plantations or West Indies unless first 
landed in England ; but this requirement seems to have been evaded 
in some way. This English legislation in effect prevented Ireland 
trading with the Plantations or West Indies except at a disadvan- 
tage intended to prevent her, and clearly illustrates how the legisla- 
tion of a dominant country can control and destroy the trade and 
consequently the industries of a subject country, and how impotent 
a subordinate parliament in the latter is to prevent this. Also ob- 
serve the moral inconsistency of at one and the same time ruling 
Ireland through a branch or agency of the English government as 
an English dominion, and yet enacting and enforcing such laws 
against England's own branch, agency, or dependency ; treating 
Ireland not as a partner, dependency, colony or neutral country, 
or enemy country, but as a victim country. It is the treatment of 
an enemy country with the addition of the peculiar elements of 
deliberate persecution which international law would not allow 
in the case of an enemy country, but overlooks when practiced in 
the shelter of domesticity. This is important as a justification of 
our irreconcilability with the guilty country, which we know from 
living experience to be as guilty today as in the times of the statutes 
cited, and which still enforces the unfair conditions created by those 
statutes. We repeat and emphasize a? a matter of constitutional 
importance affecting Ireland's restoration to her ancient place of 
sovereign independence the persistent treatment of Ireland as a vic- 
tijn country. 

The IVoolen Inditsfrv. As already mentioned, the Acts which 
prohibited and destroyed the Irish trade in cattle, with other cause 
compelled the adoption of sheep-farming to an enormous extent a 
the growth of an Irish woolen manufacture. The treatment of tlw" 
industry deserves very special attention as furnishing a character- 
istic example of England's treatment of a victim country. The 
woolen industry began with every promise and potency of success 
in a country famed for its sheep pastures and its superfluity of 
woolen and linen products ages l^efore an English foot rested on 
Irish soil. Soil, climate, abundance and quality of wool, and the 
dexterity of the people combined to give ground for reasonable hope 
that the revived industry would surpass that of ancient days. These 
elements of success were the very things to awaken English vigi- 
lance and excite England's jealousy. England saw in such a project 
in Ireland only another opportunity, of which she availed, to inflict 



62 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

a new injustice, this time the greatest and least defensible that any 
one country is known to have inflicted upon another in their peace- 
ful commercial relations. 

As early as 1545 an Act, 33 Henry VIII, c. 16, prohibited the 
importation of Irish wool into England. But the first deliberate 
blow at the Irish woolen industry and trade in goods manufactured 
from wool was the English Act of 1660, 12 Charles II, c. 4. This 
Act hit the English branch of the Irish trade in manufactured wool, 
but did not interfere with the foreign trade. Another Act of the 
same year, 12 Charles II, c. 32, and an Act of 1662, 14 Charles II, 
c. 18, made it felony, that is punishable with death, to export wool 
from Ireland anywhere but to England, and confiscated the ship 
and cargo, and goods and chattels of the master, if wool were 
brought into England except in the raw state on payment of a 
heavy duty. That was England's notion of fair dealing. 

In 1697 a violent agitation was fomented in the centers of the 
woolen industry in England, alleging decay of trade owing to the 
increase of woolen manufacture in Ireland, and calling for the 
suppression of the latter, though none of it was going to England. 
As a result of this and the decision of the English Commissioners 
of Trade thereon, a bill was drafted and sent in January, 1698, 
to the colonial parliament in Ireland for enactment. That body for 
once hesitated to pass, at England's dictation, a measure conceived 
and drafted for the purpose of destroying Ireland's promising young 
industry. It had the negative courage to do nothing. The agita- 
tion in England was kept raging, and culminated in addresses from 
the English Lords and Commons to the king. The Lords repre- 
sented to him that the growth of the Irish Woolen Industry and 
trade was so detrimental to the corresponding industry in England 
that unless promptly remedied it would necessitate "very strict laws 
to prohibit and suppress the same," and urged his majesty to repre- 
sent to the Irish that if they turned to a linen industry instead "they 
shall receive all the countenance, favor and protection for the en- 
couragement and promotion of the linen manufacture to all the 
advantages and profit they can be capable of." The Commons' ad- 
dress was similar, urging the king and all in his employment in 
Ireland "to make it their care and use their utmost diligence to 
hinder the exportation of wool from Ireland, except to be imported 
hither, and for discouraging the woolen manufacture and encourag- 
ing the linen manufacture in Ireland, to zvhich we shall always be 
ready to give our utmost assistance." As Mr. Froude says : "The 
king replied briefly that the wish of parliament should be carried 
out ; and Ireland was invited to apply the knife to her own throat :" 
English in Ireland, 1, 297. England's agents in Ireland gave sim- 
ilar assurances regarding practical encouragement to be given to a 
linen industry, provided the woolen were discontinued. No one 
cared what would become of the people if thus deprived of em- 



APTITUDE FOR INDUSTRIES 63 

ployment. One of the English pamphleteers had the Hunnish 
frankness to say that it would be ''more advantageous to England 
by one-half to buy these goods and to throw them into the sea than 
to suffer Ireland to sell cheaper than we can in foreign markets." 
How like the England of today. The fact that the industry was 
carried on in the South, where Irish Catholics were still most 
numerous, intensified the English determination to stamp it out. 
Later in the same year, 1698, the colonial body called "Irish Par- 
liament," at the second time of asking, after petty opposition on 
some finikin points, passed, by a majority of 64, the Act 10, Wil- 
liam III, c. 5, Irish, a measure dictated by England in England's in- 
terest for the destruction of Ireland's new and promising industry 
and trade. It imposed an additional duty of four shillings per 
twenty shillings in value on broadcloth exported from Ireland ; two 
shillings per twenty shillings in value on all manufacturers of the 
New Drapery except frieze, and so on. These duties were de- 
signed to be, and immediately proved to be, prohibitive and destruc- 
tive of Ireland's staple industry at the time, and one of the most 
suitable industries she had ever undertaken. 

Bearing in mind the circumstances of the time, one can estimate 
the vigor of the woolen industry from the statement of a contem- 
porary writer that it was giving employment to 12,000 Protestant 
families in Dublin, and to 30,000 Protestant families in the rest of 
Ireland. They were, from the colonial point of view, the only 
people of real importance and worth considering. But a much 
larger number of Catholic families had taken up the industry so 
far as allowed, it being a domestic and congenial industry. The 
craven Irish Act which threw those people out of employment was 
followed in 1699 by the English Act, 10 and 11 William III, c. 10, 
as to the purpose of which there could be no ambiguity. It pro- 
hibited perpetually the exportation from Ireland of all goods made 
of or mixed with wool, except to England with the license of the 
Commissioners of Revenue ; and the English prohibitory duties 
existing since 1660 were retained in force. Thus every door was 
barred and bolted, and the people of Ireland, commercially speak- 
ing, were marooned and imprisoned on their island as though they 
were lepers. Lecky savs : "The English were still unsatisfied. 
The Irish woolen manufacturers had already been excluded by the 
Navigation Act from the whole colonial market ; they had been 
virtually excluded from England herself by duties amounting to 
prohibition. A law of crushing severity enacted by the English 
Parliament in 1699 completed the work and prohibited the Irish 
from exporting their manufactured wool to any country zvhatever. 
So ended the fairest promise Ireland had ever known of becoming 
a prosperous and happy country. The ruin was complete and 
final." Subserviency had its reward in the most complete system 
of bondage ever devised by a hostile legislature ; a great young in- 



64 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

dustry destroyed, and a blow dealt at the prosperity of Ireland 
from which it was not afforded even a possibility of recovering 
until 1779, By that time the eighty intervening years of restric- 
tions had done their work so thoroughly that recovery was not 
possible. The blow was one from which, owing to the continuance 
of foreign rule, Ireland still suffers. "Thus deprived of their ex- 
port trade, and not having a home trade of sufficient extent to main- 
tain their establishments, the Irish manufacturers emigrated, some 
to the Protestant States of Germany, where they founded manu- 
factories for the celebrated Saxon Cloth — some, who were Catholics, 
to the North of Spain; and many, both Protestants and Catholics, 
to France, where they founded establishments at Rouen and other 
places, and were warmly received by Louis XIV., who guaranteed 
to the Protestants the free use of their religion, although he had 
previously revoked the edict of Nantes:" Wliliam Campbell, Com- 
mentaries on Ireland. 

The Anglo-Irish lawyers whined that the last-mentioned English 
statute was unconstitutional and illegal, Ireland having at the time 
a legislature of her own. They had what pleased them to call a 
legislature; Ireland had none. The English Act of 1699 was neither 
more nor less legal than the Cattle" and Navigation Acts and the 
numerous other English Acts whose purpose was to operate to the 
detriment of Ireland. A parliament which, when tested, had, at the 
bidding of England, basely betrayed the interests of the people it 
claimed to represent, and shown itself not alone subordinate but 
contemptible, had proved for all time the impotence and the danger 
of a subordinate parliament. The colonists who had made their 
petty parliament not Ireland's instrument but England's tool against 
Ireland in, for instance, making it felony for Irish Catholics — still 
four-fifths of the population — to educate their children, now found 
it made almost felony for themselves to exercise the skill of their 
own hands in a country they called their own. If there could be 
a lower depth for a parliament to reach, it was reached a few years 
later, when the parliament sent its wail to Queen Anne to relieve 
Ireland from the commercial depression which itself had been 
instrumental in causing. In 1719 the predominant parliament went 
further, and by the Declaratory Act of that year made all English 
statutes applicable to Ireland. 

Many tragic results followed the wilful destruction of Ireland's 
woolen industry and trade, the most tragic and most usual being 
the general and severe distress of the people in town and country, 
reaching to widespread famine every decade or so ; a result which 
continued for fully sixty years. Of this prolonged enforced hunger 
of a nation, the destruction of the woolen industry was the chief 
cause. But it was not allowed to operate alone. Other restraints 
upon Irish industries and trade were added from time to time, as 
often as any enterprise in Ireland showed vigor capable of success, 



APTITUDE FOR INDUSTRIES 65 

and Ireland was articulate only in a continual wail of anguish. 
When at last, in 1779, in obedience to a popular, not a parliamen- 
tary, demand the restraint upon trade was removed, the people had 
lost knowledge of and skill in the higher and more profitable 
branches of woolen and other manufactures ; the countries they had 
been accustomed to supply now supplied themselves ; the quality of 
Irish wool, like the skill of the people, had deteriorated from gross 
neglect; and the changed circumstances of country and people 
rendered immediate industrial revival not possible. 

The Linen Industry. Strafford, Deputy of Charles I., in his 
letters urged the advisability of "introducing" a linen instead of 
a woolen industry in Ireland, remarking, as many other English- 
men did, on the suitability of the soil, water, climate, and the skill 
of the women, who were all brought up to spin, carefully omitting 
to state that it was English rule in the few preceding generations 
that had destroyed both the linen and the woolen industries in Ire- 
land. His execution and the Cromwellian wars frustrated any 
scheme Strafiford may have devised on the subject. No practical 
steps in that direction were taken until 1698, when William III. 
redeemed his promise by bringing over Louis Crommelin, a Huguenot 
refugee, who settled at Lisburn, within ten miles of Belfast, as 
the best place for establishing the proposed linen industry. Crom- 
melin was appointed "Overseer of the Royal Linen Manufactory of 
Ireland," with suitable emoluments, patents, and some financial as- 
sistance. In 1705, the British parliament, on an urgent appeal from 
Ireland reminding them of their promise, gave their first and last 
encouragement to the Irish linen industry by the Act 3 and 4 Anne, 
c. S, allowing Ireland to export, to the plantations only, her inferior 
brown and white linens only, not the best she could produce, which 
would have been the most profitable, England reserving to herself 
the exportation of high-class linens, of course without limit of 
destination. Further, Irish ships exporting the inferior linens were 
not relieved from the prohibition against l3ringing back any cargo 
to Ireland on the return voyage. There was not much time for the 
growth of a new industry within these narrow restrictions, when 
the Act 3, Geo. I, c. 21, made the foregoing statutory permission 
to export even the inferior linens conditional on British linens being 
allowed into Ireland duty free, while Irish linens sent to England 
were still subject to a duty amounting to prohibition. Reciprocity! 
This was how England kept her promise to "give the utmost as- 
sistance" to the new industry which she had forced Ireland to take 
up on the strength of that promise. The impotent colonial par- 
liament saw no alternative but to submit to these hostile terms for 
the destruction of the linen industry, as they had submitted to the 
destruction of the woolen. .That was the end of the promise of 
generous encouragement. But it was not the end of England's 
meddling with the Irish industry. 



66 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

So timid and paralyzed was the colonial parliament from despot- 
ism without and corruption within that for more than forty years 
it did not venture to do even the little it could have done within 
its narrow range, until the famine of 174:2 forced its hands. In 
1743, when, as Lecky says, "the country had sunk into a condition 
of appalling wretchedness," the parliament began a series of useful 
measures and gave practical encouragement by bounties, prizes, and 
otherwise, to the linen, hempen and other industries ; but when an 
attempt was made to extend the linen industry to Kilkenny and 
other suitable centers in the South, where Catholics formed a ma- 
jority of the population and had been left without employment by 
the destruction of the woolen industry, the British Government per- 
emptorily prevented any such extension, and its simulacrum in 
Dublin, whether willingly or not, enforced the prohibition. Thus 
the linen industry was confined to the North. 

In 1750 the British parliament, finding that Ireland was supplying 
large quantities of sailcloth, canvas and cordage to the British and 
other navies and mercantile marines, took alarm, could not endure 
the continuance of such a profitable trade in Ireland, and enacted 
23 Geo. II., c. 33. imposing heavy duties upon all such articles 
imported to Great Britain and granting bounties upon all kinds of 
hemp manufacture exported to Ireland or to other countries, thus 
dealing a deadly blow at the Irish hempen industry which had 
grown up as an adjunct to the linen. This statute, combined with 
economic and political pressure, forced Ireland to discontinue her 
bounties to her linen and hempen manufacturers, and to admit Eng- 
lish bounty-fed sailcloth and canvas duty free ! This enabled the 
British manufacturers to flood the Irish market with their goods, 
until within a short time the Irish hempen industry was almost 
extinct. The British parliament granted bounties on linens ex- 
ported from England while withholding from the colonial parlia- 
ment in Ireland power to pursue a like policy. When in these cir- 
cumstances Irish manufacturers attempted to participate in the 
English bounties, by shipping their goods via English ports, they 
found that, so far as they were concerned, all the advantages of 
the bounties were swallowed up in the extra freight, insurance, fac- 
torage, loss of time and worry. Nevertheless. England, not feeling 
sufficiently protected by these intrinsic means, her parliament 
enacted in 1756 that "No Irish linen exported from England shall 
be entitled to a bounty if it were the property of a resident in Ire- 
land." An Englishman was free to avail of the bounty, even on 
Irish linen, but not a "resident in Ireland." That was England's 
interest in the colonists that garrisoned Ireland for her. That was 
her illustration of the alleged common rights of fellow subjects. 
In addition to the direct national injury to Ireland by this perma- 
nent hostility of England to all Irish industries, it is important to 
remember that some of the best mechanics inevitably go from a 



APTITUDE FOR INDUSTRIES 67 

country where their craft is frowned upon and ill paid to one in 
which it receives adequate pa}' and every possible encouragement — 
to the permanent loss of the oppressed country. The result was 
that neither bounties nor any other form of encouragement that the 
colonial parliament was now capable of giving could make either 
lint- farming or linen industry pay. Though less suitable for Ire- 
land, and consequently less profitable, than an unfettered woolen 
industry would have been, success could have been achieved in linen 
also under elementary fair terms from England. Whether it got 
fair terms the foregoing facts answer. "All that can be said for 
the monopolists is, that they tolerated the Irish linen trade for a 
time, as it did not clash with their interests, but as soon as they 
thought of manufacturing linen the spirit of monopoly was evoked 
and a law was passed prohibiting the importation of chequered, 
striped, printed, painted, stained or dyed linens, of the manufacture 
of Ireland and granting bounties on the exportation of such linens 
of the manufacture of England:" Campbell, Commentaries on 
Ireland. 

William's pledge supported by that of the English Lords and 
Commons and their agents in Ireland was, it is true, but a compact 
forced by England upon Ireland. According to what system of 
morality did that fact release England from keeping the compact 
it had forced upon, and which had been accepted on behalf of, Ire- 
land, by the body which England maintained as an Irish parlia- 
ment ? 

The Cotton Industry. The Act 7, Geo. I., c. 7, imposed penal- 
ties on any person using cotton goods in Great Britain unless made 
in Great Britain. The object and effect of this was to kill a cot- 
ton industry which Ireland was just then attempting to establish. 
The same English people who got their parliament to enact so, at 
a later period when the Irish people began to sign Non-Importa- 
tion Agreements denounced those agreements as immoral ! Let us 
now see exactly what those immoral agreements were. Agreements 
adopted by a society of ladies in Dublin in 1779, agreed to by all 
women throughout Ireland who desired to be considered patriotic, 
and thought by contemporaries to be one of the most important 
reasons for the extraordinary success of the men's movement which 
it was intended to assist : ' "Resolved, that we will not wear any 
article that is not the product or manufacture of this country, and 
that we will not permit the addresses of any of the other sex who 
are not equally zealous in the cause of this country." Dean Swift 
had attempted, about fifty years earlier, to set up such a movement, 
but found that he was in advance of his time. 

The Glass Industry. It is common knowledge that some indus- 
tries flourish in countries into which all the materials for them have 
to be imported. England herself is one of the greatest examples of 
this. Ireland is rich in many of the ingredients used in the manu- 



68 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

facture of different kinds of glass, especially crown glass, for which 
kelp is essential. The Act 10, Geo. II., c. 12, prohibited the im- 
portation to Ireland of any glass unless of British manufacture. 
Glass of British manufacture being scarce and costly, the Irish 
began to make glass for themselves and for exportation. Several 
glass factories were set up, the principal one being at Birr, where, 
after some time, a great variety of glass was produced. The in- 
dustry progressed so long as it was allowed to do so. This was 
only until its product began to compete successfully with English 
glass. Although there was no prospect of an increased glass indus- 
try in England, and it never grew beyond insignificant dimensions, 
yet the Act 19. Geo. II., c. 12, s. 14, prohibited Ireland from ex- 
porting glass to any country zvhatever. This illustrates how com- 
pletely a subordinate parliament may be ignored and the country it 
pretends to represent injured. It also illustrates the difference be- 
tween the treatment of an enemy and of a victim country. Further, 
it and the whole commercial policy of England towards Ireland 
illustrates what England subsequently denounced in Ireland as ex- 
clusive dealing or boycotting, the very essence of her own policy. 
The glass manufacture could never have become a staple industry 
like the woolen ; but the principle involved in its arbitrary destruc- 
tion by an outside power was the same, with this difference that 
the gain to England by that act of despotism was so paltry as to 
be contemptible. Here was an industry which Ireland might have 
been allowed to practice without competing with any appreciable 
English industry. Can any Englishman, can any man suggest any 
reason for the wilful destruction of this Irish industry other than 
malignancy? The rapidity with which the revived glass industry 
progressed in Waterford when the restrictions were removed a 
generation later enables us to estimate the considerable dimensions 
to which a glass industry in Ireland might have grown in the first 
instance if allowed. 

Perhaps some of those supercharitable persons who say that the 
English Government never meant to be unjust will explain the 
singular and uniform accuracy with which it always did the unjust 
thing to Ireland, whatever it may have meant. The system of for- 
eign rule which combines the joint methods of direct extermination 
from the land and indirect extermination by the economic pressure 
of commercial restrictions, and which has produced the ghastly 
results set forth under these heads, still persists, changed in form 
as these results themselves necessitated, but in essence, in spirit, 
and in purpose the same. Express statutory restrictions on Irish in- 
dustries and trade are no longer necessary, because they have done 
their zvork, paralyzed Ireland, and in their effects keep her para- 
lyzed so long as the connection ivith England lasts. That is the 
only reason why restrictive statutes are no longer resorted to. The 
system set up in Ireland is doing England's work effectively as it 



APTITUDE FOR INDUSTRIES 69 

stands. The examples given could be duplicated in every depart- 
ment of English rule. As no one is so blind as one who will not 
see, so no government is so bad as a government resolved to be bad. 
If anyone doubts this as regards industries, let him try, or watch 
the trial of, an attempt to found any new industry having the ele- 
ments of success. He will soon find himself, as the writer of this 
has found himself, in a maze of difficulties created by the English 
Government agency; and an appeal to an English Minister will 
elicit, in substance, if not in words, the answer that my attempt 
elicited, namely, "Ireland must be kept to agriculture," the irony 
of the situation being that the same system of government which 
thus warns Ireland off from a free choice of industries has cleared 
the Irish people off, and keeps them off, the parts of the country 
where the soil is most suitable for agriculture. Thus we are 
checked and fettered in every direction. Should the doubt relate 
to commerce, he has only to remember how, so late as 1913. the 
English Government allowed an English shipping company to break 
its contract and cease calling at Queenstown Harbor on its Atlantic 
voyages and then forbade the Hamburg-Ajuerika company to allow 
its ships to call there instead. The permanent policy of England is 
to keep Ireland weak, to kill industries in order to make Ireland 
a market for English products and things England commands. 
If that policy be indefensible in the large, as herein set out, it is 
still less defensible in the details of administration, each of which, 
set out by itself, would appear trivial, but all of which are breaches 
of a great principle and, operating together, affect the daily lives 
of the whole Irish population and force them to break all natural 
ties and fly out of their country. 

"Is it not then a bitter satire on the mode on which opinions are 
formed on the more important problems of human nature and life, 
to find public instructors of the greatest pretensions imputing the 
backwardness of Irish industry and the want of energy of the Irish 
people in improving their conditions to a peculiar indolence and 
insouciance of the Celtic race? Of all the vulgar modes of escap- 
ing from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influ- 
ences in the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the 
diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences :" 
John Stuart ]\Iill, Principles of Political Economy, II, 392. 

"Of all the oppressions with which your England had afflicted 
this country, there was not one which, by means however various, 
did not tend towards a common end ; and whether you proscribed 
her religion or warred upon her morals ; whether you engulfed her 
in apathy, or provoked her to rebellion ; whether you assailed her 
with confiscations or withheld from her her rights ; whether with 
plenary authority and the bell, book and candle of the State, you 
passed an interdict on her for ages, and committed her to darkness 
and the blank of outlawry ; or imparted to her the perfidious and 



70 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

terrible gift of laws restricting her legally from civil and religious 
privileges when these first asserted themselves ; from property, when 
property was enfranchised ; from education, when knowledge moved 
abroad ; from commerce, when commerce became a power in the 
world ; the tendency of your versatile policy continued unchanged, 
and its result has been the reduction of this land to poverty:" 
Aubrey de Vere, English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds. 



VII. 

Ireland is Financially Able to Discharge the Duties of an 
Independent State. 

The Peace Congress has a right to be assured of Ireland's finan- 
cial ability to discharge the duties of an independent State; and 
although this, being an inherent right in possession, might have been 
set forth under that heading, we deem it more satisfactory to keep 
it separate, concurring with Burke in our estimate of its importance : 
"As all great qualities of the mind which operate in public, and are 
not merely suffering and passive, require force for their display, 
the revenue, which is the spring of power, becomes in its adminis- 
tration the sphere of every active virtue. Public virtue, being of a 
nature magnificent and splendid, instituted for great things, and 
conversant about great concerns, requires abundant scope and room, 
and cannot spread and grow under confinement, and in circumstances 
straitened, narrow and sordid. Through the revenue alone the body 
politic can act in its true genius and character, and therefore it will 
display just as much of its collective virtue, and as much of that 
virtue which may characterize those who move it, and are, as it 
were, its life and guiding principle, as it is possessed of a just 
revenue. For from hence not only magnanimity and liberality 
and beneficence, fortitude and providence, and the tutelary protection 
of all good arts, derive their food and growth of their organs, but 
continence and self-denial and labor and vigilance and frugality, 
and w^iatever else there is in which the mind shows itself above the 
appetite, are nowhere more in their proper element than in the pro- 
vision and distribution of public wealth." 

Ireland is, in consequence of her wealth and natural resources 
generally, in a better position to discharge the duties of an inde- 
pendent State than are some existing small independent States, 
Avith whose public wealth comparisons may be drawn from the in- 
formation about to be submitted. England, which ought to know, 
reports dififerently. As all England's reports of Ireland are- dififer- 
ent from the facts, so is this ; and since her statesmen do know the 
facts on this subject, and report contrary to them, we leave the 
Congress to draw the conclusion. Whether Ireland is rich or poor 
is an important concern for the Irish people; should not be for 
England any more than for any other country. But we may exam- 
ine the subject on its merits, and incidentally England's afifected al- 
truism. If one of the most fertile countries in Europe be really too 
poor to undertake the responsibilities of an independent States, the 
facts set forth in this Statement show the cause of the poverty. 



73 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

Many a nation larger and of greater pretensions would have long 
since succumbed and disappeared under the tyranny under which 
Ireland has groaned. Ireland on the contrary, has in the process 
shown that she was possessed of more natural wealth than se^•eral 
of the independent States of Europe, and was spending more an- 
nually on her subjection than some of those States spend in the 
maintenance of their independence. The British Government knows 
this from the amount of money brought into their Treasury out of 
Ireland continually since they entered our country, and they know 
it with regard to the past on authority not refutable by them — the 
authority of their own expert financial commissioners appointed by 
themselves. As the misrepresentation of Ireland in this respect 
proceeds only from England, the most conclusive method of showing 
what Ireland's financial resources are is to set forth England's fi- 
nancial gains from Ireland, and the amount of financial injustice 
practised upon Ireland, that is, the amount of money that is gone 
to England from Ireland in excess of what the administration should 
cost. Ireland could be efficiently governed, administered and de- 
fended at the present time on a gross annual expenditure of £10,- 
000,000. Any greater expenditure is due to the cost of repression 
and extravagance inseparable from foreign rule. Ireland is at pres- 
ent being taxed for the benefit of England at the rate of £40,000.000 
a year. This is at once a monstrous injustice and a conclusive proof 
of the proposition of this section. 

Every material injustice to a country is in a sense a financial 
injustice. Most of those set forth under other heads in this State- 
ment produced, and are still producing, vast financial consequences. 
But for convenience we wall in this place confine ourselves to actual 
money transactions. Full justice of restitution to Ireland would 
require a beginning at some of the historical epochs, such as the 
T3attle of Kinsale or the Battle of the Boyne. For brevity and 
verifiable accuracy we confine ourselves to the period from the 
year 1800 to the present time. The general objects of the. Act 
of Union of that year were political, financial and fraudulent ; to be 
achieved, not by a multiplicity of statutes as previously, but by one 
comprehensive scheme of destroying and permanently preventing 
Ireland trading with any country but England ; destroying and 
permanently preventing Irish manufactures; making Ireland depen- 
dent for as many of her requirements as possible upon England 
and other countries through England only ; union and amalgamation 
of customs and abolition of tariffs between Ireland and England, 
in order that as soon as the different circumstances of the two coun- 
tries rendered it possible, the taxes in both countries should be as- 
similated, and Ireland should thus be compelled to pay, in addition 
to her own requirements, a large sum towards the maintenance of the 
huge imperial establishment and its vast commerce in which she 
should have no share. Her knowledge of imperial greatness was 



FINANCIAL STRENGTH 73 

to be, and actually is, limited to knowledge of the enormity of the 
burden placed upon her for its maintenance ; in other words, the 
cost of her own ruin. The fraudulent object of the Union was to , 
deprive Ireland of control of the accounts of her own public money; 
so that she should be constantly drained without being able to as- 
certain until some years subsequently, and then only from England's 
accountants, what her current taxation and expenditure were ; that 
she might, from the pressure of other grievances, not pay close at- 
tention to this one : and that she should never be in a position to 
command a clear balance sheet of her revenue and expenditure down 
to any recent date. The obliteration by these means of every trace 
of nationality and of sentiment connected therewith was the political 
object of the Union. 

The essential economic dififerences between the two countries 
made assimilation of taxes impracticable except by degrees. It has 
been carried out at intervals since ; in every case hitting Ireland se- 
verely. In pursuance of this policy, in 1819, the duty on unmanu- 
factured tobacco was raised from one shilling to three shillings per 
pound, and that on manufactured tobacco from one shilling to six- 
teen shillings. This killed at one stroke an attempt then being made 
in Ireland to found a new industry of growing and manufacturing 
tobacco. The stamp and tea duties were also increased, but not so 
heavily. The next substantial increase was in 1853, when the in- 
come tax was first imposed upon Ireland — an imposition condemned 
as unjust by every English body since set up to examine the subject 
of the taxation of Ireland. The disastrous effect upon Ireland, an 
agricultural country, of the repeal of the English corn laws has been 
mentioned in a preceding section, and is a classic illustration, first, 
of the immense financial result of a law having a different primary 
]Uirpose, and, secondly, of how a dominant country can, and does, 
enrich itself at the expense of a subject country, apart from taxation, 
and justify itself on the plea of equality of treatment. 

In 1896 a Financial Relations Commission, consisting of eleven 
British members and four Irish, whose investigations did not ex- 
tend further back than 1800, and therefore did not reach to the 
most glaring cases of injustice set forth in this Statement, after two 
years spent examining statistics and witnesses, found and reported 
that Ireland had been since the Union paying one-twelfth part of 
the whole expenditure of the "United Kingdom," whereas accord- 
ing to her comparative taxable capacity she should bear at most 
only one-twenty-first part; so that she had contributed during the 
period an annual taxation of at least £2,750,000 in excess of even 
the British estimate of her due proportion. This is set forth in a 
blue-book published by the British Government. Any British states- 
man who, in the face of this official British evidence alleges that 
Ireland would be unable to maintain and defend herself as an in- 
dependent state, knows he is alleging an untruth. It has been calcu- 



74 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

lated on the system adopted by the Commissioners that this excess- 
ive taxation from 1800 to 1914 amounted to an aggregate of about 
£400,000,000, to which must now be added the enormous increase 
occasioned by the war. For example the total taxation of Ireland 
in 1913, the last year before the war, was, in round figures, £11,- 
000,000; and this included the general average of excess — £2,750,- 
000 — which has never been adjusted. As a result of the war, the 
present taxation of Ireland is at the rate of £40,000,000 a year. A 
gneat purpose of striving to prolong the connection is to compel 
Ireland to pay England's war debt. 

Let it be distinctly undersood, the £400,000,000 excessive taxes 
from 1800 to 1914 was expenditure in excess of what the foreign 
government of Ireland had actually cost during that period, there- 
fore a net profit to England ; and that the government being foreign, 
and against the will of the people, was, as such governments always 
are, more expensive anil less productive than native government 
would have been. How indisputably true were Grattan's words : 
"Ireland, like every enslaved country, will ultimately be compelled 
to pay for her own subjugation." In presence of these facts, offi- 
cially ascertained, it is a gross display of either ignorance or malice 
to talk about the "mystery" of Ireland's continued decay and pov- 
erty side by side with England's ever-growing prosperity. The fig- 
ures account for one reason why England's prosperity ever grows. 
The only real mystery in the case is, how Ireland has survived such 
iniquitous rule. Her survival is clearly due to the extraordinary 
wealth of her resources and industry of her people, which England 
wants to continue appropriating. What the figures prove for the 
present purpose is, that a country which has paid out this vast sum 
of money without return, in addition to what the actual government 
of the country has cost, could, at the present rate of taxation, rule, 
administer and defend herself on the same scale as Holland, Den- 
mark, Sweden, or Norway, and have a handsome balance to spend 
on her urgent purposes of industrial and other development. At 
the present time England is extracting from Ireland an annual 
revenue of more than 27,000,000 pounds for imperial purposes over 
and above what efficient government and defence of Ireland should 
cost. So much for the public drain of money from Ireland. 

Many attempts have been made to calculate the gross amount of 
money drawn from Ireland to England through all the numerous 
channels such as rents to absentee landlords, tithes to absentee clergy- 
men, salaries and pensions to absentee officials, enormous law costs, 
paid in London in cases which shoilld properly have been dealt with 
in Ireland, and so on, without any return whatever. All this di- 
rectly diminishes the wealth of one country for the benefit of the 
other, without anything in the nature of exchange. The late Mr. 
O'Neill Daunt, an able and scrupulous investigator who devoted 
many years of his life to the study of this subject, says : "The aggre- 



FINANCIAL STRENGTH 75 

gate drains of income have been estimated by careful inquiries to 
amount to 13,000,000 pounds per annum." This would amount to 
1,300,000,000 pounds drawn out of Ireland to England in the 19th 
century. Certain items included in this have disappeared, and others 
are disappearing ; but since fresh items as heavy are taking their 
place, the gross sum continues approximately correct. It is an in- 
sult, as well as an untruth, to say that a country which has borne all 
the foregoing burdens for the benefit of a wealthy neighbor, would 
be unable to pay her own way if freed from that neighbor. 

Having regard to the destruction of her industries, her trade, and 
her people by that neighbor, to all the forms of misgovernment to 
which Ireland has been subjected, to her consequent backward con- 
dition as compared with self-ruled countries, and to the very large 
sum of money necessary to enable her to recover lost ground and 
overtake in the race of progress free countries with which in other 
respects she is comparable, and differing from England in having 
neither power nor desire that any other people should pay our way, 
we are, even though able to pay our way, unable to pay reparation 
charges, and clearly entitled, in accordance with international law, 
and the practice of Great States, to restitution of the money found 
by a British Royal Commission to be due to us, and to reparation 
for the damage inflicted upon us by English rule. 

If asked by the Peace Congress to accept less than the full amount, 
we would, for the sake of severing the -ruinous connection with 
England, for the sake of peace, and for the sake of obtaining an 
international guarantee that our independence shall be respected, 
accept from England in full and final discharge of her debt to us the 
sum of 500,000.000 pounds. 



VIII. 

Ireland is Fit and Prepared to Resume the Responsibilities, 
Internal and External, of an Independent State. 

As in other departments, so in this, the best way to show our 
ability to resume the responsibihties of independence is to submit 
an account of the efforts of our enemy — England — to keep us unfit 
and unprepared. That efforts for such a purpose have been made, 
that they have been elaborated with the utmost ingenuity and un- 
scrupulousness, and that they have to be renewed continually and 
persistently, attests more conclusively than other evidence could 
possibly do, English hostility on the one side, and on the other the 
extraordinary vitality and energy of those Irish attributes and qual- 
ities of a self-sufficient nation claimed in the earlier sections of this 
Statement ; since the mere suppression of them requires this enor- 
mous expenditure of the force of a mighty empire. The evidence 
has this further advantage that, being furnished unintentionally by 
the enemy, its authenticity is unquestionable ; and the enemy is 
specially estopped from denying it. All this is conclusively demon- 
strated by the facts of each department we have touched upon. The 
effort, unsurpassed in history, to exterminate the whole Irish nation, 
by direct expulsion from the land has proved more conclusively than 
anything else could do Ireland's fertility in manpower. The huge 
and persistent eft'ort to destroy Irish commerce has proved more 
conclusively than anything else could do the ability of an independent 
Ireland to become a commercial country. The huge and persistent 
eft'ort to prevent us having any manufacturing industries, and to 
destroy such as we venture to found, has proved more conclusively 
than anything else could do the ability of an independent Ireland 
to become an industrial country. The elaborate mechanism by 
which England has despoiled us of our money and her rich and 
continued success therein, has proved more conclusively than any- 
thing else could do that Ireland is a country of rare natural re- 
sources, and that, with these secured to her by independence, she 
would be a prosperous country. The effort to brutalize us by pro- 
scribing our religion and civilization, and using the power of a 
mighty empire to misrepresent and malign us to the outer world, 
proves more conclusively than anything else could do that an inde- 
pendent Ireland would be a considerable civilizing and progressive 
factor in the world. So it would be with any other department we 
might choose to examine. Indeed, why should it be otherwise in 
Ireland or any other intelligent nation? Who knows the needs and 
aptitudes of any country better than its own people? Has England 



ACTUAL EQUIPMENT AS A STATE 77 

monopolized the good sense of the world, as well as its money? 
She once thought her American "plantations" incapable of ruling 
themselves. If she were not deficient in some way, she would re- 
member the lesson then taught her. It is consummate insolence to 
assume that this nation is incapable of discerning and providing for 
its own interests. It would be impossible for native government 
to rule so badly as this Statement shows England to have ruled 
Ireland ; unless the Irish were a lawless people. England's own 
statistics with reference to Ireland prove that, so far from being 
lawdess, they are the most law-abiding people in Europe and the 
freest from what is universally recognized as crime, but incurably 
addicted to manifestations of patriotism, of which England is an 
admirer in countries not subject to herself, but which she treats as 
crime in Ireland. Like rational people, we aim at a government re- 
sponsive to our principles, needs and instincts, as only a native gov- 
ernment ever can be. As Burke observes : 'The people have no in- 
terest in disorder." Foreign rulers frequently have. In this con- 
nection w^e have merely to prolong the chain of accumulative evi- 
dence to the goal of showing the permanence of the English rule 
which Macaulay attributed to the 18th century only, "Its misery was 
necessary to our happiness and its slavery to our freedom." Not 
then alone, but throughout the last 350 years has England treated 
Ireland as if its misery were necessary to her happiness. Most 
English politicians, absolve their own generation at the expense oi 
those that preceded it ; a cheap salve for external consciences, having 
no such faculty of their own. England's permanent policy is to make 
and keep Ireland unfit for any useful purpose of her own, or for any 
purpose but that of a victim to be plundered and exploited for Eng- 
land's benefit. No country was ever created for a purpose so vile. 
We maintain that Ireland was not.- 

Ireland stands to-day provided wnth a full staflf capable and ready 
to assume and discharge with credit all the duties incumbent upon 
her as an independent State in all its departments, civil, military, 
financial, and judicial, in the form of a democratic republic, reviv- 
ing in some respects the ancient Gaelic polity ; competent to maintain 
national and personal liberty, national and personal property and 
security, to bring Ireland back under her own law, which she will 
not merely obey but respect and love, as in the distant past. • For 
obvious reasons, the details of our constitution, the personnel of 
our provisional government, and our plans generally cannot be dis- 
closed until England's power of destruction in Ireland has been 
broken. 

In these circumstances, perhaps the department most ap- 
propriate for illustrating in this section England's destructive policy 
is that by means of which she destroved our ancient polity and has 
prevented the substitution of any other on a national basis — that 
covered by the imperialistic motto. Divide and Rule. Wise Eng- 



78 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

land has been in making it her motto and permanent gaiide. An un- 
divided Ireland no outside power could ever rule or hold. First 
England sent one lago to whisper poison into the ears of one Irish 
chief against his neighbor, and another lago to the neighboring 
chief for a like purpose. When the human consequences followed, 
she played the umpire or supported a competitor of her choice or 
acted otherw^ise as her selfish interests prompted, and carefully 
slandered both sides to the outer world. So she acted from end to 
end of the country, and from year to year, changing the details 
according to local or current circumstances. Whenever she thought 
her colony strong enough, her game was modified, but always the 
same in principle. When by continuous practice of those arts her 
power had become dominant in the land, she gladly annexed to her 
armour}^ the abused name of religion, interpreted only by that anti- 
thesis of Christianity — unreasoning and undying hatred among 
neighbors ; made her colony her tool in the practice of this on 
the Irish nation ; retaining in her own hands power over that tool, 
until to her horror she saw a danger of its reconciliation and amal- 
gamation with the Irish nation. Well knowing that this would be 
disastrous to her, England resolved that it should not be. Recon- 
ciliation, harmony, amalgamation w^ere the things she feared in 
Ireland beyond all others, the things by which her grip of Ireland 
would soon be broken; the things the success of which would be 
the dawn of Irish independence, prosperity and happiness. Hence 
the profession of lago is a permanent and indispensable part of the 
English government of Ireland. 

From the invasion down to modern times there has always been 
this essential difference between the attitude of the Irish and that 
of the colonists : the former having been always described as the 
"Irish enemies," had no option but to smile and return- the compli- 
ment, sons phrase; to the latter England was always the Mother 
Country, no matter how ill she treated them. The same difiference 
still exists, with this modification, that many people of English or 
other outside extraction now stand with and as part of the Irish 
nation, and may feel and do feel quite assured of an honored and 
efficient place in our new constitution ; while on the other hand 
some degenerate bearers of Irish names have, for immediate per- 
sonal gain, joined the pro-English faction. At no time in that 
whole history did all the colonists and pro-English together equal 
the Irish in numbers, not even after the Cromwellian massacres. 
No person in Ireland to-day supports English rule who is not paid 
for it directly, indirectly, or prospectively. English rule in Ireland 
has no support but hired support. In no country in Europe, whether 
free or unfree, is there greater unanimity among the people for in- 
dependence than in Ireland. But a minority having the control of 
the machinery of government, of the garrisons, and of the resources 
of the country, and an outside power to fall back upon, once given 



ACTUAL EQUIPMENT AS A STATE 79 

by that power ascendancy over a disarmed nation, can maintain 
that ascendancy, at the price, however, of its own continued sub- 
serviency to the outside power. It can never itself become an inde- 
pendent nation except by abandonment of its ascendancy and union 
and fusion with the nation. After the destruction of the Irish 
polity, the ruin and suppression of the nation, and the permanent 
planting of sufficient English, backed by armed force, not subject 
to any civilized restraint, the increased foreign colony began to 
dominate the nation, leaning for support upon and acting as the in- 
strument of the outside power; suffering grievances itself and fear- 
ing to resent them lest it should lose mastery of the nation which 
lay at its feet and whose property it had appropriated. Thus a 
major and minor oppression were in progress in Ireland concur- 
rently. The nation was treated brutally by the foreign power act- 
ing both directly and through the colonial instrument. The colony 
was being oppressed in a minor, still severe and humiliating degree 
by the same foreign power for which it was oppressing the nation. 
Forced by a long course of this treatment and by the appalling mis- 
ery which it had been instrumental in bringing upon Ireland, en- 
couraged by the example of the American colonies, and conscious 
of the opportunity which England's difficulty afforded, the colon- 
ist volunteers of the 18th century began to move towards a con- 
ception of national independence. That is as high as their declara- 
tions enable one to put it ; and that is how they were understood 
by the Catholics at the time. Not being blinded by corruption or 
office, they recognized that for any such purpose, emancipation of, 
and amalgamation with, the Catholics of Ireland was a conditio sine 
qua nan. Consequently, in February, 1782, 143 delegates from the 
whole body of the Ulster volunteers assembled in the Protestant 
Church of Dungannon, and adopted important resolutions, one of 
which, not so familiar to the public as the rest, is relevant to the 
present subject : "We hold the right of private judgment in matters 
of religion to be equally sacred in others as in ourselves. Resolved, 
therefore, that, as men and Irishmen, as Christians and as Protes- 
tants, we rejoice in the relaxation of the penal laws against our 
Roman Catholic fellow subjects, and we conceive the measure to 
be fraught with the happiest consequences to the unity and pros- 
perity of the inhabitants of Ireland." Overtures in this sense, so 
congenial to the Irish, met wath a prompt and generous response. 
England had driven her colonists on both sides of the Atlantic to 
lay aside factitious differences and unite against her as the common 
enemy. As the Viceroy, the Duke of Portland, wrote at the time, 
it w^as no longer the parliament of Ireland which had to be man- 
aged ; it was the w^hole country. "The spirit of mutual toleration 
was considered by the English government as extremely formidable ; 
and it employed all its policy to destroy it, and revive the old re- 
ligious and national animosities :" Augustine Thierry, Norman 



so IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

Conquest, II, 356. Hitherto England had based her power in Ire- 
land on keeping the colonists and the nation apart and at enmity, 
in order to keep both weak, that she might plunder and oppress 
both. The unexpected union of both, while it lasted, diminished 
England's power for mischief, and gave the united Irish their only 
chance of liberty. England knew this much better than they did, 
having just learned the lesson from the North American colonies. 
Therefore she increased her agents and machinery and increased 
their activity to prevent a repetition of that lesson in Ireland, by de- 
stroying the new unity and with it all it meant of good for Ireland, 
of disappointment for England. To divide became imperative if 
she would continue to rule. With the aid of her myriad agents 
and expenditure of uncounted money, extracted from Ireland, she 
soon succeeded in having the volunteers disbanded and measures 
taken successfully to reverse the policy of Dungannon and revive that 
degrading bitterness to which she prostitutes the name and com- 
plicity of religion ; the perpetuation of which bitterness is England's 
last bulwark in Ireland. Nor can we wonder much at her success 
then, witnesses as we are of her success in our own 20th century 
in finding "a man, an Irishman, a Qiristian and a Protestant" 
founder and chief of a body bearing the sacred name of Ulster 
Volunteers, without any intervening history to justify the change, 
devoting his considerable ability to reversing the Christian policv 
of Dungannon, and, in England's interest and to Ireland's detri- 
ment and shame, advising and promoting perpetual animosity and 
estrangement between these two sections of the inhabitants of Ire- 
land, who would have been assimilated in generous friendship long 
ago if only let alone. England cannot afford to let them alone, be- 
cause it would mean the loss of Ireland to her. 

We pity those successors of the colonists, victims of evil advisers, 
but we do not implore them to join us. Why should we? We do 
not tempt them with promises of any special benefit or privilege if 
they do join us. Why should we? We are not going to seek re- 
forms, but to free our country, and we offer them the privilege, 
sufficient for men worthy of freedom, of joining us in that noble 
work on absolutely equal terms. That is a proposition worthy of 
men who are themselves worthy of such a cause. To offer them 
special advantages would be an offensive suggestion that they were 
not patriots. If they are not, we do not even desire them; if they 
are they will join us on terms of brotherly equality. Ireland's 
claim is emphatically not one which any conceivable legislative re- 
form under England's control could satisfy. The historical facts 
submitted herein establish this abundantly. They are submitted for 
the further reason that a bare assertion without historical vouch- 
ing would be scarcely credible ; and further still that know- 
ledge of them will be salutary for other nations as well as for Ire- 
land. It is from foreign rule Ireland needs and claims release, ir- 



ACTUAL EQUIPMENT AS A STATE 81 

respective of the quality of the rule. Foreign rule imposed upon 
an unwilling nation is itself a breach of international law and jus- 
tice, and an international wrong justifying resistance to it, even if 
the rule were good. The particular forms, extent and duration of 
oppression — terrible though we have shown them to be — are rend- 
ered of secondary importance by the scope of our claim for sovereign 
independence. They merely go to enhance the national wrong and 
more than justify resistance to it and determination to bring it to an 
end. They merely increase the unanimity for freedom and strip 
England of all but hired support. We deny that any country other 
than Ireland herself has, or can ever have or acquire, a right to 
rule Ireland. We complain of the quality of the rule only as an 
aggravation of the thing indefensible in itself, and showing that 
it is equally so in practice as in principle ; above all, as being for- 
eign interference with our affairs and contravention of our national 
right. Furthermore the evil intentions and mischievous results of 
English rule are evidence of such a spirit, so essentially dangerous 
to mankind, that it is due to all nations to be informed, in order 
that they may be on their guard against a State animated by such 
a disposition. 

Every operative law connotes a corresponding right. A nation's 
obligations and duties, whether contracted or necessarily arising 
from its conduct or the requirements of international law or of hu- 
manity, are held to continue, irrespective of any change of govern- 
ment, voluntarily made by the nation, and cannot be repudiated by it. 
A necessar}^ corrollary of this is, that a nation's rights also con- 
tinue, irrespective of any change in the government, and, a fortiori, 
irrespective of a change of government forced upon the nation 
from outside. Therefore Ireland's right to sovereign independence 
continues unimpaired. 

For all reasons, of which those set forth in this Statement are 
examples, Ireland's ancient status as a sovereign State, the sum of 
all her rights, is unimpaired and ripe for independence and inter- 
national recognition. 



IX. 

Ireland is Entitled to the Right, Common to Nations and Persons, 

of Self-Preservation Against England's Policy 

of Extermination. 

From the middle of the IGth century when the bold policy of 
exterminating the whole Irish nation by the sword or by famine 
was commended to and graciously adopted by King Henry VIII 
of England, down to the present day, two fundamental questions 
for the Irish nation have been, first, whether it is entitled to self- 
preservation; and, secondly, whether the country — Ireland — witli 
all it comprises, belongs to the Irish nation or to the English Gov- 
ernment. Though no Peace Congress, and no honest person could 
have any doubt as to the true answers to these elementary ques- 
tions, to settle them has all that time been, and still is the cause of 
the perpetual war between the English government and the Irish 
nation. Throughout all that time England has adhered in practice 
to the policy of extermination, normally alternating between the 
sword and State-created famine ; occasionally plying both concur- 
rently. From the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, State-produced 
famine has been the continuous normal policy, reaching its highest 
development within living memory in Queen Victoria's reign, and 
still in operation in the milder form of emigration forced by eco- 
nomic pressure. We shrink from stating more of the harrowing 
particulars of famine and eviction than will be found in the section 
on man-power, where the result of that policy is shown to be that 
of a race now numbering 30,000,000, only a remnant of about 4.- 
000,000 remains in Ireland. 

National as well as individual character is tested by suffering and 
proved by surmounting difficulties. What nation has been tested as 
Ireland has been? That there is an Irish nation in existence to-day, 
in spite of England, is a marvel of the age. We feel that the char- 
acter also exists. That is the foundation of our hope. History 
tells of other victim countries. It also tells that a victim country 
which survives oppression, and retains sufficient vitality and vigor 
to demand independence, will make either an excellent member of 
the family of nations, or a dangerous country to exclude from that 
family and attempt to keep it in the position of a victim. Unpro- 
voked tyranny stuns and terrifies ; and sometimes escapes immedi- 
ate punishment. Retribution may be postponed. "Judgment for 
an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two ; some century 
or two ; but it is sure as life, it is as sure as death :" Carlylc. We 
have no desire to be the instrument of the just judgment upon 



RIGHT OF SELF-PRESERVATION 83 

England; but a strong desire not to be; for that judgment must be 
terrible. Apart from whatever of voluntary good we may be able 
to do for others, our definite objects are Sinn Fein — Ourselves. The 
continuance of foreign despotism becomes unsafe when the victim 
nation's heart is wrung with the record of the destruction of all that 
is dearest to her. When she sees with her own eyes and knows with 
her own reason that she can escape the utter destruction to which 
her foreign oppressor has doomed her only by a supreme effort the 
moment her opportunity arises, to make that effort becomes the 
imperative duty of all who bear her name, making the gentle fierce, 
and even the timid brave. All foreign rule is unjust. The right to 
resist injustice is indestructible. All foreign rule is slavery. The 
duty of resisting foreign rule is incumbent on all who ought not to 
be enslaved. This is the test of character self-applied by each in- 
dividual ; English rule of Ireland being foreign, unjust, and slavery, 
is destructive as well, has destroyed, is destroying, and has doomed 
the Irish nation to utter destruction. That is its distinguishing note. 
The case is urgent in the last degree. Why need this be said, when 
the facts force the conviction upon whoever thinks at all? 

According to international law, the right of self-preservation 
is the first law of nations as of persons. It is prior and paramount 
to even that ■ of territorial inviolability ; and where they conflict, 
international law justifies the maintenance of the former at the ex- 
pense of the latter right. As a consequential part of this right of 
self-preservation, a nation's sovereign independence and her pur- 
pose to achieve or maintain it, as the case may be, should be con- 
stantly and publicly announced and firmly maintained before the 
world, on account of possible designs against it by any neighbor- 
ing nation. No nation can ever have, or acquire, a right to destroy 
another nation either directly by the sword or by famine, or any 
other process, or to prescribe what means a nation so menaced shall 
or shall not employ, or when or how it shall employ them, for its 
self-preservation, or to require any account whatever of the nation's 
conduct or proposed conduct in this respect; and a nation so men- 
acing another, and attempting any such restraint, or inquisition, is 
already guilty of the destruction of that nation, and the supreme 
transgression of international law. All means that do not affect 
(he independence of other nations are lawful for a nation to employ 
for its self-preservation. In the case of a nation in bondage and 
menaced with destruction as Ireland premanently is, where the 
bondage and the destruction proceed from the same source, the 
struggle for self-preservation and for independence is the same. 
Independence, and nothing less, would be self-preservation. The in- 
herent right of a nation to rebel against a destructive outside power 
is the natural expression of the right of self-preservation, and be- 
comes a duty when the conditions afford a possibility of success. 
The enforcement of a policy of destruction is ample justification, in 



8-i IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

morality as well as according to international law, for the adoption 
of any means necessary for self-defense and self-preservation, nec- 
essarily including rebellion as the most obvious means. The con- 
ditions of success may easily lurk incalculable in a combination 
of circumstances on both sides, such as the opportuneness of attack, 
the weakness or other occupation or temporary blunder of the foe, 
or the inscrutable decrees of Providence. Rebellion is always just 
when it has for its object the rescue of a nation from a destroying 
power; the reparation of a national wrong which by its nature 
continues and festers while that power lasts ; the restoration of 
friendly relations with other States estranged by that power ; the 
release of the faculties and resources of the nation from that power 
for its own people ; and the establishment of security against future 
aggression by that power. All these conditions exist together in 
the case of Ireland. A nation whose country has been repeatedly 
ravaged by an outside power, and is, in the interest of that power, 
kept perpetually in a ravaged condition ; and is, in the interests of 
that power, restrained from assuming any other condition ; denied 
the exercise of her elements of progress in any direction whether 
on the national or the local scale; stripped of her resources mostly 
for foreign purposes antagonistic to her ; denied control of the 43 
administrative boards planted in her midst by England for Eng- 
land's purposes, and of her money spent on their maintenance : 
manifestly such a nation is being deliberately robbed and destroyed, 
and owes to herself the urgent duty of self-preservation. Ireland 
is so situated. Unvarying experience convinces us that continual 
misery and consequent decay and revolt are inseparable from foreign 
rule : and that rule itself, as a condition of its own maintenance, 
making national resuscitation impossible ; and that the destruction 
of the nation or the destruction of the foreign rule over it are the 
only alternative remedies. Between forces so diametrically op- 
posed, not temporarily, but permanently, where every pretence of 
adjustment and reconciliation has been used by England, as it is now 
being used, as a new trap for the increase of aggression and de- 
ception, reconciliation is quite impossible, and sovereign indepen- 
dence the only remedy. Either the power that is destroying Ireland 
must triumph and the Irish nation cease to exist, or that power 
must be eliminated from Ireland. The Irish nation is immortal and 
cannot cease to exist. A nation animated with that spirit is at once 
indestructible and irreconcilable with slavery. As the continuous 
policy of destruction has in the past made the duty of rebellion con- 
tinuous, so the Irish people are determined it shall be until the de- 
structive power is wholly expelled. To allow such an unequal and 
deadly contest to drift indefinitely, with its chronic toll of human 
misery and periodical toll of human life, would be to allow con- 
tinuous turmoil and in effect to adopt the side of the strong party, 
contrary to the merits of the dispute. To put Ireland's right at the 



RIGHT OF SELF-PRESERVATION 85 

very lowest, surely an international Congress of civilized States 
owes the common duty of justice and humanity to save an historic 
nation from an otherwise interminable policy of extermination. 



X. 

Ireland has Rightly Asserted Her Right in Armed 
Insurrection in 1916. 

People not sufficiently interested to give due consideration to the 
matter may suppose that a military failure cannot corroborate a right 
to the object for which the military effort had been made ; and all 
worshippers of wealth and success, and despisers of failure, irre- 
spective of merit, eagerly concur with them. The approval of this 
latter class we do not desire, because it would be prima facie evi- 
dence of some flaw. To the first-mentioned class we would ob- 
serve that the matter is not quite so simple ; that the greatest failure 
in history has been the greatest moral success ; that there have been 
instances of a similar phenomenon in mundane affairs ; that faith 
in a cause intrinsically good, proved by the courage to fight against 
overwhelming odds, even to the supreme sacrifice of life, commands 
universal admiration, may be admirable in the degree of probabihty 
of failure, and therefore strengthens the claim to the object of 
the effort. This sufficient reason has also the support of interna- 
tional precedent. Greece sustained a military defeat in her last re- 
bellion against Turkey ; and yet was, in consequence of that effort, 
recognized by England and other European States, and in virtue 
of that recognition obtained her independence. On the other hand, 
those who dispute the proposition of this section do so in the name 
of some law, forgetful of the fact which must always be remembered 
that it is not by law or justice or reason, but only by force and 
fraud, Ireland has been subdued and is kept in subjection. Since 
force and fraud can neither confer a right nor legalise a usurpation, 
those who employ them have no appeal to law or to anything but 
more force and more fraud ; and that is precisely their situation in 
Ireland. As Burke says : "The use of force is but temporary. It 
may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity for 
subduing again, and a nation is not governed which is perpetually 
to be conquered." 

Any government which is not responsible to the people governed, 
and in some way under their control, is unconstitutional and in- 
evitably becomes a tyranny. At best, a condition of which we have 
no experience in Ireland, it must lead those conducting it into ignor- 
ance of the people's grievances, with the natural consequence of 
failure to remedy them. As Franklin wrote of American gover- 
nors, "Their office makes them intolerant, their indolence makes 
them odious, and being conscious that they are hated, they become 
malicious. Their malice urges them to continual abuse of the in- 



RIGHT OF INSURRECTION AGAINST TYRANNY 87 

habitants in their letters to Administration, representing- them as 
disaffected and rebellious, and (to encourage the use of severity) 
as weak, divided, timid, and cowardly." That product of a young 
polity was angelic compared with the regular product of an inveter- 
ate system of corruption. We have mentioned some instances of 
English recognition of Irish national distinctions. Perhaps the 
most significant of all is the negative recognition involved in the 
entire absence from the English mind, official and unofficial, of any 
recognition of responsibility to Ireland. To any free man, such an 
attitude, on the part of a State boasting freedom and intelligence, 
is scarcely conceivable. To the English, straight from reading in 
any one of their standard text books, that a government which is 
not responsibly to the people governed is not constitutional, fully 
concurring in that ■ doctrine, nay, enforcing it at the edge of the 
sword, the idea of English responsibility to Ireland never seems to 
enter their minds. How they manage to keep logic and practice in 
direct antagonism, and expect that, for their convenience, free and 
intelligent people will do the same, we do not undertake to explain. 
We merely state the fact, which may be verified any day. Illus- 
trations of this hypocrisy are too numerous and too humiliating even 
to expose. One of the latest examples must suffice. Take the proc- 
lamation issued by the representatives of England at Bagdad on the 
19th ]\Iarch, 1917: "O People of Bagdad! Remember that for 
twenty-six generations you have suffered under strange tyrants, who 
have ever endeavored to set one Arab house against another, in 
order that they might profit by your dissensions. This policy is 
abhorrent to Great Britain and her Allies, for there can be neither 
peace nor prosperity where there is enmity and misgovernment. . . . 
Since the days of Halaka your city and your lands have been 
subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into 
ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers 
and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been 
carried off to wars not of your seeking; your wealth has been 
stripped from you by unjust men, and squandered in distant places. 
. . ." So much alike tyranny seems to be at Bagdad and in Ire- 
land that the tyrants of Bagdad would appear to have imitated the 
tyrants of Ireland ; and the British authors were peculiarly quali- 
fied for writing this proclamation. Or take the official utterance 
of Lord Robert Cecil, representing- the British Foreign Office, on 
22nd ]\Iay, 1918 : "We must look for any future settlements, to a 
settlement, not of Courts or Cabinets, but of nations and popula- 
tions. . . . Government must be carried on by the consent 
of the governed ; no greatness, no culture, no national existence can 
be built upon the oppression and subjugation of nations rightly 
struggling to be free." These quotations show that the English 
government understands liberty as well as bondage, and therefore 



88 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

that their tyranny in Ireland is a sin against the Holy Ghost. Con- 
trast their professions abroad with their practice in Ireland as 
shown in this Statement. Contrast them with the actual situation 
in Ireland when those inspiring words were uttered. 

At present the English King and English ministers, whose power 
in Ireland is in no way derived from or through the Irish people, 
whether in England, in Ireland, or anywhere else, never acknowl- 
edge any responsibility to the Irish people, and would repudiate 
any suggestion that they are or ought to be responsible. The Irish 
people have always adjusted their minds and conduct to this fact, 
on the basis of the government not being theirs in any but the mili- 
tary sense as the people of a conquered country. This English 
government is recognized by itself, by those it governs, and by all 
who study the matter, as not being to any extent the choice of the 
people or under their control ; therefore irresponsible, illegitimate, 
and unconstitutional. Notwithstanding its representation of itself 
to the outer world, it fully recognizes itself and has to be obeyed 
in Ireland, as an unmitigated despotism. Ireland is permanently in 
a state of siege. \MiiIe that state is maintained by England, it 
would be absurd to deny that a state of war exists between that 
Government and Ireland. The only union that ever has existed 
between Ireland and England, and the only union now existing be- 
tween them, is a union of force. During the whole seven centuries 
and a half since the Anglo-Norman invasion, there has never been 
a moment of unforced union between these two countries. While 
the ancient Irish polity lasted it was a union of assailant and as- 
sailed. Since England's power became dominant in Ireland, it has 
I)een, and now is, a union of bondage, of master and slave, of tyrant 
and victim. As Burke says : "A government against which a claim 
for liberty is tantamount to high treason, is a government to which 
subjection is slavery. . . . Nobody will be argued into slavery." 
Supreme power and its exercise in Ireland have been since the days 
of Elizabeth and now are entirely in the hands of the English mili- 
tary. The permanent presence in Ireland of an immense Army of 
Occupation, backed by a further force of 12,000 called police, but 
equipped, disciplined and employed as an army ; the supreme power, 
civil and military, vested in the Commander-in-Chief of the English 
Army of Occupation, that person being wholly irresponsible to any 
Irish person, or body ; our post office, our letters, our communica- 
tions, our railways, our waterways, our lands, our mines, our rivers, 
our harbors, our labors, our industries, our products, our property 
of all kinds, our raw materials, our manufactured articles, our fairs, 
our markets, our food, our clothing, our schools and colleges, our 
amusements, our going and coming, our domestic and social rela- 
tions, our words and actions in public and private, all are controlled 
and hampered, more aggressively during war, but effectively at all 
times by the "competent military authority" — the irresponsilile Com- 



RIGHT OF INSURRECTION AGAINST TYRANNY 89 

mander-in-Chief of the English Army of Occupation, with all the 
power of that army and of the military police, spies, and agents 
provocateurs under his control. Let who can reconcile this situation 
with freedom or with England's professions to the outer world; 
and let who can find a more accurate description of the professions 
than colossal hypocrisy. There being no pretense possible that this 
universal and perpetual militarism is derived from God through 
the people, we do not here speculate as to its source, but observe 
that, being foreign military despotism, not lacking in any of the 
characteristics of usurpation and tyranny, devoid of popular sanc- 
tion on one side and of acknowledgment of responsibility on the 
other, it is an execrable and infamous tyranny wholly devoid of 
moral sanction and of binding force beyond what brute force im- 
poses. True to its nature it punishes as crime, with only a military 
trial, or a civil trial subject to military control, or no trial of any 
kind, according to the unfettered discretion of the military author- 
ity, such manifestations of patriotism as the same English govern- 
ment encourages in Belgium. Serbia, Bohemia, Esthonia and Bagdad. 
What is known in other countries as ordinary civil law is normally 
suspended in Ireland, and in addition to the general military rule, 
England keeps constantly in force in Ireland — the freest of all 
European countries from crime of moral turpitude — exceptional 
coercive laws, formerly enacted for short periods and requiring fre- 
quent renewal to deal with popular movements, now simplified by 
being made permanent. 

Of this an example is the Jubilee Coercion Act, technically known 
as the Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act, 1887. This 
elaborate military rule amounts to evidence, furnished by England 
herself, that a state of war exists permanently between her and 
Ireland — and therefore there can neither be a pretense that the 
government is constitutional nor that the Irish nation is content 
with the government. To deny that the connection is one of force 
would be to deny the whole history of the relations between the two 
countries, and would amount to suggesting that a further addition 
to Ireland's long list of insurrections against England is required to 
convince the Congress of Ireland's just and irreconcilable attitude. 

The sinister levity with which England entered into the Great 
War has been exposed by events. She disregarded the solemn warn- 
ing of her poet : 

". . . take heed how you impawn my person, 
How you awake the sleeping sword of war ; 
I charge you in the Name of God take heed." 

Shakespeare. Henry V. 

The first action of her government was that of all tyrants — to 
stifle public opinion by capturing the whole newspaper press if pos- 
sible, and forcibly silencing such as refused to be captured. Then 



90 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

the captured press was used to create a bloodthirst with such cries 
as "Business as Usual," "Capture German Trade," "Save Civiliza- 
tion," "Avenge German Atrocities," "Free Small Oppressed Na- 
tions," and "Put an End to Alilitarism." Readers of this State- 
ment are in a position to judge of England's qualifications for pro- 
claiming these things through the press and on dead walls. The 
two first were for the English people, for whom material gain was 
the object of the war; the other cries being baits for getting recruits 
from subject nations, who were expected to be too stupid to see that 
they ought to be amongst those whom the war was to set free, and 
would fight England's battles and get buried in heaps or return 
maimed to their slavery while the English stayed at home reaping 
the profits. It was a complete plan for making wealthy England 
wealthier at the cost of the lives of her duped subjects. Not all 
the enslaved people were so stupid as England wished them to be. 
Far too many thoughtless Irish youths were carried away to the 
war by the manufactured enthusiasm which the press and recruiting 
officers told them was real, but which the Secret Treaties have since 
exposed. Those treaties would not have helped recruiting anywhere. 
Hence their secrecy. It was confusing to hear recruiting officers 
in the uniform of Ireland's enemy, and well known to be enemies 
themselves, seducing young men by all sorts of low tactics, as sing- 
ing popular songs like "God Save Ireland," their real purpose being 
not so much to win the war as to get as many Irishmen as possible, 
whom they themselves would be glad to shoot, shot by Germans 
instead. To the thoughtful the whole scheme, coming from the 
military despotism which was throttling the country, was the most 
impudent effrontery in history. It stung them into thinking and 
acting for the most oppressed nation notv extant, the only op- 
pressed nation to which they owed a duty, and for which no one 
would think or act if they did not. No form of tyranny could be 
more monstrous and odious than that which would by moral, eco- 
nomic or any other form of pressure whatever force men in bond- 
age to fight for the freedom of other peoples and the perpetuation 
of their own slavery. To fight for the oppressor who despised them 
would be evidence to the world that they were unworthy of free- 
dom. If Englishmen were to say that the Irish are now free, 
the obvious retort is that our condition has been described in this 
Statement, and that whatever Englishmen may please to call it we 
have no right to inflict it upon others ; and that if it is our condition 
that is to be imposed upon small nations as a result of the war, 
then the war has been a greater misfortune than even we supposed. 

England tries to confuse the issue by talking of "Ireland's duty 
in the war." Free and powerful States have great duties, which 
thev do not always discharge. Small and independent States have 
a duty to maintain their integrity and independence by neutrality 
if possible. A nation in bondage has few duties except to herself. 



RIGHT OF INSURRECTION AGAINST TYRANNY 91 

and she is the sole judge of them and of when and how they should 
be discharged. Ireland has no responsibility for, nor hope of gain 
from, nor duty in respect of the war; though, unlike independent 
States, she is compelled to pay heavily for it. She has no more 
duty towards the war than Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, 
and Switzerland, most of which countries are nearer to, and in 
business relations more affected by, the war than Ireland, which 
is not allowed to have any business relations. Being independent, 
they do not waste their manhood or their money in other people's 
wars. They are not expected to do so, and no one regards their 
neutrality as cowardly or selfish. The fact that they are in the actual 
enjoyment of that supreme political good is the difference between 
them and Ireland as regards the war. Ireland wants that, and 
wanting that wants everything essential for the external equipment 
of a State. To supply that want, to recover her independence, is her 
first and most urgent duty. Until that has been successfully dis- 
charged she can owe no duty to any other country, least of all to 
her oppressor. England wants the world to assume that the fact 
of Ireland being subject to her imposes a duty upon Ireland to de- 
fend her. If that were international law, why did it not impose a 
duty upon Greece to defend Turkey? Greece rebelled against Tur- 
key, and though she failed, England was one of the States that in- 
sisted that Greece should be made independent ; and Greece was 
made independent. International law has not changed since then. 
As well might a band of robbers claim to impose a duty on a victim 
in their den to defend them against the police. The defense the 
victim would need is against the robbers ; the defense Ireland needs 
is against her only enemy. Foreign rule, whether good or bad in 
detail maintained by military force in the manner we have seen, 
imposes no obligation beyond the prudence of obedience in respect 
of that force. Neither duration nor number of repetitions can 
amend or validate a title originally vicious. The obligation to which 
the situation gives birth is to destroy that force as soon as possible. 
The desire of people to release their country from that tyranny, is 
still, as it always has been, the very definition of patriotism, the 
very virtue which England appeals to and encourages in Belgians, 
Serbians, Bohemians, Esthonians and Arabs ; in any nation sub- 
merged by States opposed to her ; but treats as crime in any nation 
submerged by herself. To apply the name of international law 
to such moral twisting and perversion of justice is an outrage upon 
Ireland, an insult to the Peace Congress and a permanent danger 
to the peace of the world. 

All the Allies cannot be supposed to have intended their good 
principles and purposes, as England does, for one section of man- 
kind only, and that section to be determined not by themselves, but 
by England. If the professions be of universal application they 
command respect. Otherwise they would be indefensible and con- 



92 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

temptible. Ireland would be glad to achiev^e her independence, as 
Norway did, without loss of human life. Neither the failure of 
peaceful methods nor the guilt of violent methods shall rest with 
Ireland. But can the lamb of its own motion safely become recon- 
ciled with the wolf ? The problem is a grave one for the lamb. 
Too often we have attempted to reason with England, nation with 
nation, and she cheated and insulted us every time. We are pleased 
to have a strong constitutional case to submit to the nations ; better 
pleased that the Irish nation here and now is determined not to be 
ruled by England. That permanent elemental fact cannot be left 
out in any useful consideration of Ireland's case. 

Burke says: "Every nation has formed to itself some favorite 
point which, by w^ay of eminence, becomes the criterion of their 
happiness." With some, wealth and monopoly of commerce no 
matter how ill-gotten is the criterion. \\^e are sufficiently perverse 
to hold that such a nation does not understand civilization, that 
wealth is no more civilization than it is happiness, and that what 
secures happiness has far more affinity to civilization than what 
secures wealth. The ideals of our ancestors were, as we have seen, 
wholly different from those of the English, always comprising, as 
those of their descendants do, national independence. In other 
respects our ideals are more modest than those of most nations. 
They do not inhere in the acquisition of other people's property. 
We revere the memory and respect the virtues of our ancestors, and 
must be allowed to love every rath and ruin, stream and hill hal- 
lowed by their amusements, their tears or their blood. Naturally 
strangers may not understand this. There is no more necessity 
for their doing so than for us to understand everything in the 
strangers' lives, provided we mutually leave each other unimpeded 
in what does no harm to anyone. A subject people's love of unsub- 
stantial things does not relieve a government of the permanent dvity 
common to all governments of saving the people. Still less does 
it justify a policy of deliberate destruction of the people and treat- 
ment of their country as a victim country. A dominant country 
so acting forfeits all right to be called civilized, and therefore for- 
feits all right to dominate. Our nation's survival through that 
ordeal, and our continued existence in spite of that government is 
a triumph of spirit over brute force exercised brutishly. It proves 
more than our vitality : it proves the sustaining help of Providence. 
Bondage under that tyranny makes us heirs to a duty towards our 
country which worshippers of wealth and material success neither 
experience nor understand ; the performance of which duty we 
regard as a privilege ; the urgency of which duty endears our coun- 
try to us beyond expression. It is for the sake of Ireland, not of 
our stomachs or pockets, we are interested in public affairs. In 
her sufferings we all suffer, materially and spiritually. In her free- 
dom we all shall be free. In the case of an enslaved people, love 



RIGHT OF INSURRECTION AGAINST TYRANNY 93 

of country and love of freedom are one. W'henever since her 
subjection Ireland has not been in open insurrection, her suppressed 
sorrow and hidden sufferings, hke those of a woman, have been sever- 
est. So felt the patriots of 191G — pure, brave patriots beyond the 
understanding of a plutocratic State, and achieving a spiritual suc- 
cess beyond the range of its powers. Faithful to country and to 
duty, their names will live with imperishable honor in the venera- 
tion of all freedom-loving men, inspiring, fortifying, encouraging 
all in bondage in that unconquerable fidelity to principle and duty 
which prevails ultimately, and which tyrants dread. Worshippers 
of wealth and material success, who have neither soul nor principle 
apart from selfish interest, sneer at the military failure of 191G, 
and taunt the Irish nation with not having supported its patriots, 
who were able to hold the Capital of Ireland for only one week. 
Not a bad achievement at all for less than a thousand half -trained 
men against forty thousand regular soldiers of a mighty empire, 
supported by all State machinery at the public expense. There 
is little foundation for imperial boasting there. There are few 
instances in history in which the majority of a nation took part or 
had an opportunity of taking part in an insurrection for its freedom, 
secrecy being always a condition of action. Some of the most suc- 
cessful and beneficent insurrections have been begun by quite a 
small body of men. And the tyrant's satisfaction, shown in the 
manner common to tyrants, with what he calls the Irish failure in 
1916 is spoiled for him, since he must and does recognize the 
unanimity of the nation now. Is that failure? The patriots asked. 
Is Ireland never more to call her soul her own? They gave the 
answer themselves ; and the keenest desire of almost unanimous 
Ireland today is to give the same answer. Owing to one of those 
unfortunate incidents to which revolutionary armies are specially 
exposed from defective communications, only a fraction of the 
Irish Republican Army was brought into action. Small though 
that fraction was, it comprised two distinct bodies — the Irish Yol- 
unteers and the Citizen Army. But they fought under a joint 
command with the common object of throwing off the foreign yoke 
and establishing a republican form of government in Ireland. It 
cannot be denied that that was a public and patriotic object falling 
within The Hague Convention. 1907, clause c. agreed to in a time of 
peace — that men who have fought for a public and patriotic pur- 
pose should not, on surrendering and laying down their arms be 
executed as criminals. Not that our patriots would have shrunk 
from anv consequences of their action, but that it is our duty, on 
their behalf, and The Hague Convention shows that it is the wish 
and interest of civilized nations to resent the savage treatment, and 
to charge England with it. There is nothing in that convention 
to exempt England from observing it : and nothing to exempt Ire- 
land from the scope of its mercy. The action of our patriots in 



94 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

1916 in rising and holding the capital of Ireland for even 
one week against 40,000 imperial troops would of itself entitle us to 
approach this Congress, be recognized by it, and secure independ- 
ence from it. The barbarous action of the English government in 
Ireland on that occasion enhances this right, and will, we trust, 
lead the Congress to regard it as an important addition to the other 
grounds of our claim, and to accede to that claim. 



XI. 

Ireland's Purposes on Resuming Independence are 
Those of Peace and Progress. 

Notwithstanding the prolonged torture Ireland has endured, as 
herein disclosed, which she has borne with wonderful restraint and 
patience, we do not entertain any feelings of revenge, because it is 
foreign to our nature, because it is immoral, and because a vast 
and urgent work which it is our duty tO' do awaits us, and we 
count the hours and minutes in our eagerness waiting for that 
sovereign independence which is essential to enable us to begin this 
work. While waiting, \we are preparing ourselves as far as circum- 
stances permit. The entire popular voluntary activities of Ireland 
today, intellectual and material, have for common object national 
self-preservation and revival. We challenge investigation of this 
by or on behalf of the Peace Congress, because we know that an 
investigation w411 find Ireland amply endowed wnth virtue, ability 
and purpose to maintain our national individuality, moral, intellec- 
tual, economic and political ; a more widespread and spirited effort 
to rev'ive the Gaelic language, literature, music, drama, civilization 
and congenial industries than has ever been witnessed in a sub- 
merged nation for like purposes ; all the more creditable because 
these activities have to encounter and overcome the constant organ- 
ized hostility, open and secret, of the English government and its 
agents in Ireland. All the time, talent and enthusiasm directed to 
these specific aims are directed, through these aims, to the common 
goal — sovereign independence. Should any doubt of this be sug- 
gested, we invite a referendum of the entire adult population, male 
and female, of Ireland — by which our representatives have been 
appointed to this Congress — whereby the validity of our representa- 
tion and any part of our case may be tested. It will be found 
that the pro-English faction, always a minority, is now reduced to 
the beneficiaries and expectant beneficiaries of the present foreign 
government ; the mass of the population, of all races and creeds, 
being Irish Independents, eager to put their abilities to the test in 
a free democratic republic of Gaelic structure. On the other hand, 
we point to England's unwillingness to submit her pretensions in 
Ireland to any democratic test as confirmation of our claim and 
England's admission that she holds Ireland by force against the 
will of the Irish people. 

The diflFerence between freedom and bondage is comprehensive 
of the ideal as well as the material, necessitating considerable dif- 
ferences of thought and action, so that the preferences and dislikes 



9G IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

of one of these conditions cannot be inferred from the other. We 
look forward to our State bearing much resemblance to the State 
outlined in the second and third sections of this Statement ; little 
or no resemblance to the condition to which England has reduced 
us, and continually working to its own perfection. We look to 
seeking, finding and developing Irish interests common or harmoniz- 
ing with those of other States, to the mutual advantage of all and 
the security of peace and progress. 

We also have preliminary work analogous to that of Tone, thus 
stated by himself: "To subvert the tyranny of our execrable gov- 
ernment, to break the connection with England, the unfailing source 
of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my na- 
tive country — these were my objects." That preliminary work 
achieved, we would probably begin by relieving civilians from mar- 
tial law, confirming such laws as are useful pending modification 
by our national assembly, and requiring judges and magistrates to 
take a new oath of allegiance. Children of a land wilfully ruined 
and degraded, we long to discharge our duty to an outraged parent 
and restore her to her native dignity and grace. We seek only 
exclusive sovereign control of Ireland and of all our interests, af- 
fairs and relations, internal and external, without involving wrong 
to any other people. We as a nation have the same right which an 
inoflfensive individual has to liberty, subject only to the common 
condition that liberty is not to be exercised to the detriment of 
others. We seek only the simple, logical, elementary justice of self- 
determination. We have no designs against any other people, and 
no intention of trying to dominate or conspire against any people 
in the world. W'e expect all lovers of peaceful progress to be our 
friends, and we theirs. Should we still have enemies, they will 
be also enemies of peaceful progress. W^e feel that we are at the 
dawn of a new^ epoch of grand achievement in a land all our own, 
hallowed by the lives of our forefathers for two thousand years, 
sanctified by their ashes. Our hearts vibrate with the spirit and 
purpose of renewed youth, buoyant, electric, adaptable, intolerant 
of external restraint ; indelibly impressed with that unmitigated 
evil ; resolved and conscious of ability to cast it out and keep it out. 
Like the eager horse before the race, we long and strain to test our 
capabilities in the solution of the problems that await us. The 
things we shall do are countless and great in both the material and 
the spiritual sense ; to be determined and undertaken in due order 
by the nation itself; and no individual is competent to do more 
than suggest them in advance. We all have our dreams of a limited 
number of them. We spring again as a State into international 
life, full of new ideas, new hopes and unrestrainable rejuvenescence. 
Urgent as our own requirements are after long bondage, our pur- 
poses for the future are not limited to them. Our historical claim 
accruing from the past is enhanced by the existence in Ireland 



PURPOSES ON RESUMING INDEPENDENCE 97 

today — as the Irish mission to China demonstrates — in spite of our 
intervening adverse history and present deplorable condition, of 
numerous men and women animated by precisely the same self- 
sacrificing^ evangelizing zeal for countries that need such services 
as impelled our forefathers to render those services to Europe 
from the sixth to the twelfth century. This attitude of mind is a 
living pledge that the rescue of Ireland from bondage would release 
and devote a further valuable contribution to universal civilization 
and justice, now declared to be in danger. It also reveals the 
commensurate loss which a continuance of Ireland's bondage would 
impose upon the best interests of mankind. Thus the ancient, the 
present, and the available future of Ireland's beneficent potentiality 
towards other peoples constitute quite a unique claim for favorable 
consideration by the Peace Congress. For ©urselves, we mean to 
undertake, and with God's help achieve, the difficult and varied 
work of national reconstruction. We hope to restore, in the ful- 
ness of its faculties, the soul and personality of our nation, and to 
rekindle ancient flames. A new Gaelic literature will spring up, 
so different from that with which Ireland is now flooded that in 
itself it will astonish and edify all, and in its intellectual and moral 
effects amount to a new gift to civilization. We shall restore 
philosophy and law and literature and music and art to their ancient 
place of honor. We shall aim at attaining in music as distinguished 
a place in our own time as our ancestors did in theirs. We shall 
make Ireland once more the home of learning and the hospitable 
refuge of all who esteem learning. We shall abolish utterly the 
foreign system of anti-national education, and build up a new sys- 
tem on an Irish foundation. We shall eliminate all class distinctions 
save those of Christian culture, which itself will be the free reward 
of ability applied. Our people will love their country for reasons 
additional to the orclinary ; the past experience of sleepless foreign 
hostility ; the new experience of cherishing Gaelic care. We shall 
co-operate in the genuine work of saving civilization by precept 
and example fundamentally diflferent from those of the statesmen 
who have brought the scourge of war upon the world. We shall 
restore our country's name to honor among the nations. Our State 
shall be a harmonizing influence in the world. We shall provide 
incentives for the art and mechanical skill and dexterity of youth 
and maiden, and take care that merit receives its due reward. We 
shall aim at making our nation self-sufficient and self-supporting, 
so that want shall be unknown. We shall aim at evolving an 
economic system in which there shall be neither master nor slave, 
neither millionaire nor pauper; and we shall eliminate the foreign 
pauper system with all its trappings. We shall make the homes 
of the poorest in the country and in towns places of refinement, 
pride and delight, nurseries of grace and virtue. We shall release 
the land from the blighting grip of the monopolist, divide it up 



98 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

into various sized holdings to suit all means and tastes, and subject 
most of it to the plough; and, as under the Brehon Laws, every 
Irishman desiring it shall be entitled to a sufficiency of land for 
the maintenance of his family, on the sole condition of putting it 
to the best use. We shall clothe the cultivable hills with verdure, 
and the uncultivable with beautiful sheltering forest. We shall take 
charge of our railways and all forms of transit, and adjust them 
to our requirements. The variety and value of our bog products 
will excite the envy of countries not so endowed. The air shall 
ring with the variety of sounds of contented industry controlled 
by the people, sweet as the song of birds. We shall harness our 
rivers and apply their now idle powers to light, heat and industry. 
We shall cultivate fish in lake and river. Sea-fishing shall become 
one of our great and profitable industries under efficient protection. 
The outer world will find our port towns great marts of fish, corn 
and choice farm and garden products, as well as the manufactured 
articles, art and literature of a cultured people. We shall build up 
a mercantile marine, and make such provision for the defense of 
it and of our country as the international situation at the time may 
dictate. On what we believe to be a universal principle, we shall 
trade with whatever countries we find a mutual advantage in trading 
with. If England should come within that category, but not other- 
wise, we shall hold ourselves free to trade or not to trade with 
her as our best interests determine. We shall cultivate muscular 
and disciplinary development by efficient drill of our young man- 
hood, who will proudly volunteer for the privilege of fitting them- 
selves to defend their country, prosperous and happy, because 
free. 

To the people of any free country, the foregoing will appear 
commonplace duties and functions. It would be difficult to point 
out one of them that is not legitimate, or one that would be dan- 
gerous to the peace of the world. With us they will amount to all 
the difference between the condition of independence and that of 
a victim country. We look to the Peace Congress to show what it 
thinks of the system of government which treats these purposes as 
criminal. 



XII. 

Ireland's Sovereign Independence is Essential to the 
Freedom of the Seas. 

Whatever Ireland possesses containing a possibility of competing 
with England, if portable, is transferred to England; otherwise it 
is put out of action. English rule has put our most fertile lands out 
of cultivation by exterminating the cultivators, and has reduced the 
lands to one-fourth their natural productivity by turning them into 
grazing tracts for English use. England has condemned our mines 
to remain unworked for no reason but because the working of them 
would compete with English industries. For the same reason our 
l)ogs, a vast source of industry and wealth in a free Ireland, lie 
unutilized in an enslaved Ireland. That this is the result of de- 
liberate purpose, the present writer has tested and found. The 
Irish railways, designed and constructed under English direction 
for the purposes of England's army of occupation, have no relation 
to the business requirements or development of Ireland. Our 
plentiful water-power is condemned to idleness because England 
desires all mills and all profits from milling to be hers. Our rivers, 
lakes and canals are in effect forbidden as ways of traffic ; because 
such cheap inland transport would make Ireland largely self-provid- 
ing, and thereby diminish the Irish market for English goods. We 
have twenty-two harbors ranking amongst the finest natural harbors 
in Europe for ocean-going traiific, and numerous safe and convenient 
harbors for local traffic. England, with no title but that of superior 
force, has deprived almost all of them of their natural shipping and 
forced them to remain, as they now are. empty and unused. The 
very geographical position in which the Creator has placed Ireland, 
any advantage or disadvantage from which inherently belongs to 
Ireland, and which eminently fits her for a great carrying trade, 
is actually claimed by England as a newly discovered reason for 
preventing any such trade and for keeping Ireland in bondage. In 
the 18th century, before this audacious claim was thought of, Ed- 
mund Burke gravely asked, "Is Ireland united to the Crown of 
Great Britain for no other purpose than that we should counteract 
the bounty of Providence in her behalf?" When England arrogates 
to herself exclusively, and expects an international Peace Congress 
to sanction by acquiescence, a claim infinitely more audacious than 
has ever before been made by any country over another, involving 
the commercial isolation of Ireland from the rest of the world, and 
foreshadowing a certain danger to international commerce, all na- 



100 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

tions are entitled to be told under what law, national or international, 
this monstrous claim is made ; if it be necessary to keep Ireland thus 
isolated and in bondage, what law gives England an exclusive right 
of doing that ; under what law England claims this unlimited and 
manifestly unjust license, while all other nations subject themselves 
to a code of international justice; and for what offense is the his- 
torical Irish nation condemned to this isolation and bondage. In 
fine, where is this arrogant appropriation and domination to stop? 
Are the Irish people to be deprived of the light of day and of the 
air they breathe if scientific development should enable a stronger 
and wealthier State to appropriate those elements ? When most 
nations are demanding freedom of the seas for commerce, and in- 
land nations are claiming free access to the sea, Ireland is so for- 
tunate in being surrounded by sea that her whole claim is one of 
elementary simplicity — sovereign independence — the right to be let 
alone. We deny that any other State but Ireland alone has or can 
ever have an exclusive right to Ireland's harbors. We say that 
such a claim by a State gviilty of the abuses of power exposed in 
this Statement is an outrage upon public justice and international 
law. It amounts to asking the Peace Congress — and at a time when 
the world yearns for equal justice for all — to reverse the laws of 
nature and of nations ; to make Ireland's very simple case appear 
to be complicated ; to decree that Ireland shall not be permitted to 
make her own legitimate use of her harbors and geographical posi- 
tion facing the Atlantic and the great trade routes ; that Ireland 
shall not be allowed to enjoy her natural advantages of any kind, 
internal, external or geographical; and all this for no better reason 
than because England possesses superior force. If ever the issue 
of Might against Right were definitely raised, it is raised by Eng- 
land here. It is only against Ireland her force is being exercised 
now. How long will her arrogance, if successful now, bear that 
limitation? If this power over Ireland were left in England's hands 
until she had her scheme of naval bases on the Irish coasts com- 
pleted, she would certainly be in a position to dominate trade on 
the Atlantic, and indeed on all seas. Before acquiescing in such a 
purpose, the Congress may desire to know what countries are to be 
restricted, the extent and duration of the restriction, and in whose 
interest. It may seem that we attach undue importance to the 
future freedom of the seas. But it is vital to us; and our convic- 
tion is based on our experience of English rule as disclosed herein. 
Not only in the past, but at present, in the continued effect of legis- 
lation, policy and administration — as exemplified in the exclusion 
by England of the Hamburg-Amerika line of steamships from an 
Irish harbor in 1913 — Ireland is permanently isolated from the 
rest of the world ; and our experience convinces us that commercial 
freedom is attainable onlv through sovereign independence. 

He respectfully asks the Congress in considering our claim against 



ESSENTIAL FOR FREEDOM OF THE SEAS 101 

England's pretension to remember that ours is not the claim of a 
new country, but one which, when independent, maintained close and 
friendly relations with continental countries when traveling was 
difficult, and that England's purpose is to deny her this liberty when 
traveling is easy. It is a pretension of such a character as to 
suggest that the power which already dominates the great water- 
ways and strategic points of the world has ulterior objects which 
she cannot prudently disclose. It is a pretension of such a nature 
that if allowed to strangle Ireland it would not even then be satisfied, 
but would grow with its success. England offers no guarantee that, 
if her pretensions were allowed now against Ireland, they would 
not be developed for larger purposes when she found herself strong 
and other countries in difficulties. Relevant to her colossal display 
of selfish arrogance in trying to obtain tacit international sanction 
for a palpable outrage upon one nation and a menace to many, we 
ask the Congress to consider seriously the significant fact that in 
all the treaties into which England has entered she has studiously 
observed SILENCE upon disputed points of maratime international 
law, thereby reserving to herself freedom to maintain her ozvn 
interpretation of international law on these important points. If 
England's pretension against Ireland in this matter were, tacitly 
or otherwise, allowed, her navy, which destroyed Irish shipping and 
swept Irish commerce off the seas, as we have shown, and which 
still prevents direct commerce between Ireland and other countries, 
would undoubtedly, under cover of her policy of SILENCE, ex- 
clude the navies and commercial shipping of the world from Irish 
harbors, would extend and perpetuate the domination of the most 
dishonest and selfish of all nations ; would gradually reduce inter- 
national commerce to a condition of dependence upon England ; 
would make freedom of the seas a dream instead of a reality ; would 
render it forever impossible to rescue Ireland from England's 
stranglehold ; and would frustrate the purpose of this International 
Congress by sowing a permanent crop of disputes and consequent 
wars. It may not for long be the interest of any State, if it be 
the interest of any even now, to contribute to the creation of an 
octopus for its own destruction by abandoning Ireland now to that 
octopus. 

Grotius in his treatise, Mare Liberum, has many wise remarks 
apposite to the present situation, from which it may be permissible 
to quote : "So far as peace is concerned, it is well known that 
there are two kinds of peace, one made on terms of equality, the 
other on unequal terms." 

Again: "But though God reserves to Himself the final punish- 
ment slow and unseen but none the less inevitable, yet He appoints 
to intervene in human affairs two judges whom the luckiest of 
sinners does not escape, namely, conscience, or the innate estimate 
of oneself; and public opinion, or the estimate of others. These, 



102 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

two tribunals are open to those who are debarred from all others; 
to these the powerless appeal ; in them are defeated those who are 
wont to win by might, those who put no bounds to their presumption, 
those who consider cheap anything bought at the price of human 
blood, those who defend injustice by injustice, men whose wicked- 
ness is so manifest that they must needs be condemned by the 
unanimous judgment of the good, and cannot be cleared before the 
bar of their own souls." 

Finally he says, addressing Holland, a smaller country than Ire- 
land, "Therefore if it be necessary, arise, O nation unconquered 
on the sea, and fight boldly not only for your own liberty, but for 
that of the human race. 'Nor let it fright thee that their fleet is 
winged, each ship, with a hundred oars. The sea w^hereon it sails 
will have none of it. And though the prows bear figures threaten- 
ing to cast rocks such as Centaurs throw, thou shalt find them but 
hollow planks and painted terrors. 'Tis his cause that makes or 
mars a soldier's strength. If the cause be not just, shame strikes 
the weapon from his hands'." 



xin. 

England is Disqualified and Unfit to Rule Ireland. 

The Irish nation has never had a parHament on the EngHsh model 
or according to Enghsh law. There is no reason in the nature of 
things why it should. The Gaelic Feis was, long befjore England 
had a parliament, much more comprehensive in scope, the adoption 
and promulgation of laws being only one of its many functions. 
Although the Feis had ceased to meet, the Gaelic polity had, in 
virtue of the excellent legal system, retained its force for local pur- 
poses down to the middle of the 16th century. Little conferences 
of the leading colonists in the English Pale, convened on each oc- 
casion by emissaries from England sent over specially to inaugurate 
some new scheme of aggression, dignified themselves with the name 
"parliament" long before that word had acquired its modern na- 
tional meaning, and called their resolutions "statutes," as certain old 
societies still do. They made big pretensions; but to the Irish na- 
tion they were only so many reminders that an enemy was within 
the gates. That little parliament of the Pale, which was Catholic, 
ended, and the colonial parliament, which was Protestant, and an 
effective instrument, began under King Henry VIII of England. 
Those different sorts of parliaments were, however, alike, in this, 
that the members considered themselves Englishmen in Ireland for 
the purpose of maintaining and extending England's power here, 
and consequently acknowledged England as a country entitled to 
dominate Ireland so far as their power reached; and on various 
occasions in both periods sent members or delegates to the parlia- 
ments of England in the various cities in which parliaments were 
then held ; murmuring against this requirement, not on national 
principle — because they had none except in respect of England — 
but because of the expense : Monk Mason, Parliaments of Ireland, 
passim. There were several parliaments of the colonial pattern 
held during the reign of Henry VIII ; and he tried to make them 
Irish parliaments, not by election, but by having Irish chiefs invited 
to them. Not many of the chiefs attended ; few of those who did 
attend understood what they had been summoned for; and when 
tendered an oath to which they objected, they withdrew. _ The only 
parliaments in the English sense in which the Irish willingly par- 
ticipated were the Confederation of Kilkenny in the time of Charles 
I, and the parliament called by James II in 1689. Of the latter 
Thomas Davis says, "The parliament v/hich passed those Acts was 
the first and last which ever sat in Ireland since the English inva- 
sion, possessed of national authority and complete in all its parts. 

103 



104 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

The king, by law and in fact — the king who, by his Scottish 
descent, his creed and his misfortunes, was dear (mistakenly or not) 
to the majority of the then people of Ireland — presided in person 
over that parliament. The peerage consisted of the best blood, 
Milesian and Norman, of great wealth and of various creeds. The 
Commons represented the Irish Septs, the Danish towns, and the 
Anglo-Irish counties and boroughs. No parliament of equal rank, 
from King to Commons, sat here since ; none sat here before or 
since, so national in composition and conduct." All the enactments 
of that parliament were nullified by England as had been those of 
the Confederation. 

From the invasion down to the present time England has never 
been faithful to any one of the numerous treaties she entered into 
with Irish kings, princes and people. One of the most disgraceful 
crimes in history, having regard to the circumstances, was the 
immediate breach of the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. Her policy 
of making treaties with the Irish deliberately to break them when 
the immediate purpose was attained explains her uniform treatment 
of them, before and after, as ''enemies." Whatever happened she 
so classed them. Let us, therefore, in this section, confine ourselves 
to her treatment of her own oflfspring, her colonists in Ireland, who 
also, at England's bidding and for England's purposes, called the 
Irish and treated them as "enemies." After what England called 
her "Irish Parliament" had enacted its declara.tion of legislative 
independence in 1782, the British parliament also enacted the same 
measure as an additional assurance that the independence would 
be respected. Still the Irish Volunteers, the driving force in w^in- 
ning that measure and other useful measures about that time, know- 
ing England and being uncorrupted, were not satisfied, and refused 
to disband, unless England gave a further guarantee. Hence, on 
the 22nd January, 1783. the British parliament went further and 
passed the Renunciation Act, 23 Geo. HI, c. 20, solemnly declaring 
that the legislative independence of Ireland should remain for ever 
unquestioned and unquestionable. In November of that same year,, 
the Irish Volunteers having been disbanded in the meantime, that 
same British parliament passed a measure enabling it to resume 
the power it had so grossly abused, and got the colonial parliament 
in Ireland to relinquish, stealthily, the very power which the British 
parliament had declared ten months before should remain for ever 
unquestioned and unquestionable. That was the sort of faith Eng- 
land kept with her own ofifspring. Let us examine that institution 
more closely. 

The institution called "Irish Government" is not, and has never 
been, more than a branch or agency of the British Government. 
That branch or agency has never been, and is not now, elected by 
or responsible to the Irish people, nor even to the English colonists 
in Ireland, though for England's purposes of dissension it favors 



ENGLAND INTERNATIONAL LAW-BREAKER 105 

them. Nor was it responsible to the colonial institution called 
"Irish Parliament" when that existed ; nor was that parliament 
itself elected by the Irish people or under their control. "The Irish 
Parliament was simply an institution for registering the edicts of 
the English Privy Council" : Murray, Commercial Relations be- 
tzveen England and Ireland. There is abundant evidence that it did 
not trust the "government," which, however, it rarely had power 
or courage to resist. From the fact that it had been created and 
was sustained by an external power as the parliament of a planted 
sect, a small minority in number, but with a commission to overrun 
the country, appropriate all property and dominate the nation, two 
consequences flowed : first, that it was essentially hostile to the Irish 
nation ; and secondly, that it could be withdrawn or extinguished 
by its creator. By no other method could it ever be freed from 
those consequences than by a breach with its creator and amalga- 
mation with the nation, to suppress which was its original func- 
tion. And, as a matter of historical fact, it never achieved anything 
beneficial to the whole Irish population, or anything that might be 
recalled to its credit, and never attracted the support of the Irish 
nation, until, under pressure from the Volunteers, who recognized 
the necessity and desired reconciliation with the nation, it at last 
showed a tendency toward such breach and amalgamation. The 
parliament having, as a condition of its existence, to rely upon ex- 
ternal force against the nation, was long precluded from becoming 
reconciled with its victim. This could not be done until it was in 
a position to shake ofif the external power. What has been said in 
previous parts of this Statement sufficiently indicates how the in- 
stitution worked. Extracts from a pamphlet written by the late 
Lord Dufl^erin in 1867 will further illustrate the situation : "From 
Queen Elizabeth's reign until the Union, the various commercial 
confraternities of Great Britain never for a moment relaxed their 
relentless grip of the trades of Ireland. One by one each of our 
nascent industries was either strangled in its birth, or handed over, 
gagged and bound, to the jealous custody of the rival interest in 
England, until at last every fountain of wealth was hermetically 
sealed, and even the traditions of commercial enterprise have per- 
ished through desuetude. . . . What has been the consequence 
of such a system pursued with relentless pertinacity for two hundred 
and fifty years? This — that debarred from every other trade and in- 
dustry, the entire nation flung itself back upon the land, with as 
fatal an impulse as wdien a river whose current is suddenly impeded 
rolls back and drowns the valley it once fertilized." A "Letter to 
the People of Ireland," printed in 1779, for obvious reasons anony- 
mously, but now in the Library of the British Museum, thus states 
the matter: "It is true that a pension list is a cause (of Ireland's 
poverty) ; a prodigal succession of administrators is a cause ; but 
the fundamental cause of distress is that, being burdened with a 



106 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

pension list and drained by an anny, we are disabled by restrictions. 
The internal system of government is one grievance ; the external 
policy of England is a greater grievance." And all this while a 
"parliament" existed in the country. When in 177G that institution 
attempted to resist further injury from the ''government," the diffi- 
culty was overcome in the manner stated by Mr. Lecky, History of 
England, IV, 441 : "A step was taken by the government which 
in England would probably have been followed by an impeachment. 
Eighteen Irish peers were created in a single day, and seven barons 
and five viscounts were at the same time raised a step in the peerage. 
The terms of the bargain were well known to be an engagement to 
support the govermnent by their votes in the House of Lords, by 
their substitutes and their influence in the House of Commons." 
A parliament dominated by an alien power is a mockery. Mr. 
Froude says. "The Irish were not to be blamed if they looked to 
Spain, to France, to any friend on earth or in Heaven to deliver 
them from a power which discharged no single duty that rulers owe 
to subjects." 

It will have been noticed that little space is devoted in this state- 
ment and that little with reluctance, to the Penal Code of Laws 
against Catholics, so far as that can be called a religious persecu- 
tion ; too little space in comparison with the importance of the sub- 
ject and the enormous abuse of power it was in dealing with a 
Catholic nation. But any review of misgovernment in Ireland 
would be misleading without some mention of the subject. Apart 
from its intrinsic importance, scope and long continuance, it was 
a kev abuse which inspired or was made a pretext for all the others. 
It directly furnished inspiration and incentive for destroying root 
and branch the whole Irish civilization, religion, law, learning, and 
all that appertained to those things : and offered the property of 
Catholics as tempting rewards to Protestants who would inform or 
comply with other vile terms, ^^'hen purposes the most gross and 
indefensible were planned and carried out. an inseparable accompani- 
ment was a mixture of nicknames, insult and calumny applied to 
the scourged nation and the religion it professed : God and religion 
were invoked on behalf of the particular plunder: and "the same 
price of £5 was set on the head of a priest and on that of a wolf, 
and the production of either head was a sufficient claim for the 
reward :" Hovcrty. 

"Amongst the Catholics at least religious intolerance has never 
been a prevailing vice, and those who have studied closely the 
history and character of the Irish people can hardly fail to lie struck 
with the deep respect for sincere religion in everv form which they 
have commonly evinced. Their original conversion to Christianity 
was probablv accompanied by less violence and bloodshed than that 
of anv equallv considerable nation in Europe : and in spite of the 
fearful calamities which followed the Reformation, it is a memor- 



ENGLAND INTERNATIONAL LAW-BREAKER 107 

able fact that not a sinj^^Ie Protestant suffered for his reH^ion in 
Ireland during all the period of the Marian persecution in England. 
The treatment of Bedell, a Protestant prelate, during the outbreak 
of 1641, and the Act establishing liberty of conscience passed by 
the Irish parliament of 1689, in the full flush of the brief Catholic 
ascendancy under James II, exhibit very remarkably this aspect of 
the Irish character ; and it was displayed in another form scarcely 
less vividly during the Quaker Missions, which began towards the 
close of the Commonwealth, and contmued with little intermission 
for two generations:" Lecky, Eighteenth Century, II., 389-91. 

With reference to the Penal Code : "It was a complete system, 
full of coherence and consistency ; well digested and well composed 
in all its parts. It was a machine of wise and deliberate contrivance 
and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degrada- 
tion of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, 
as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man:" Edmund 
Burke. 

"The eighteenth century was an era of persecution, in which 
law did the work of the sword more effectually and more safely. 
Then was established a code framed with almost diabolical in- 
genuity to extingiiish natural aff"ection — to foster perfidy and hy- 
pocrisy — to petrify conscience — to perpetuate brutal ignorance — to 
facilitate the work of tyranny — to render the vices of slavery in- 
herent and natural in the Irish character, and to make Protestantism 
almost irredeemably odious as the monstrous incarnation of all 
moral perversions .... Having no rights or franchises — 
no legal protection of life or property — disqualified to handle a gim, 
even as a common soldier or gamekeeper — forbidden to acquire the 
elements of knowledge at home or abroad — forbidden even to ren- 
der to God what conscience dictated as His due — what could the 
Irish be but abject serfs? What nation in their circumstances 
could have been otherwise? Is it not amazing that any social vir- 
tue could have survived such an ordeal ? — that any seeds of good, 
any roots of national greatness could have outlived such a long 
tempestuous winter?" Godkin, History of Ireland, II., 116. 

Let us look at another aspect of the colonial institution. In the 
case of a self-ruled country, an indefensible pension list, though a 
grievance, to be redressed by the country itself, could scarcely be 
of sufiicient importance to deserve mention in a Statement for 
an international purpose. But in this case a view of an Anglo- 
Irish pension list is essential to complete the picture of the un- 
realtv of self-rule and the degrading reality of the status of a 
victim country. 

"The greater part of the Irish revenues was directly expended 
in the interest of England and of individual Enelishmen :" Mur- 
rav. Commercial Relations. In the 17th and 18th centuries the 
value of money differed largely from now. averaging up to ten times 



108 IRELAND'S CASE EOR FREEDOM 

its present value. Be it remembered while reading- this paragraph 
that pensions on the Irish revenue were illeg^al according^ to both 
Eng-lish law and Anglo-Irish law. In addition to this, some of 
the Irish statutes for raising money expressly precluded the imposi- 
tion of pensions on such money. But is it not a condition of sub- 
mergence that law for the protection of the submerged must yield 
to power ? As soon as the colonial parliament had voted the various 
sums, it had no more power over them ; and the English agency 
calling- itself "Irish government" applied the money to the most 
corrupt purposes, such as pensions to prostitutes of royalty, salaries 
and pensions attached to trivial or sinecure offices, etc. "The gov- 
ernment arj^ued that the king had an uncontrolled right to charge 
the money brought into the treasury with pensions ; for the barring 
in the statutes for hearth-money, quit rents and licenses could 
affect the money only before it was brought into the treasury. 
Once the money was in the treasury, it became part of the agg^re- 
gate fund to be used indiscriminately for the support of the gov- 
ernment. In England there was no instance of the Crown granting 
any pensions for a number of years or lives on the produce of 
funds raised and granted by means of a statute law for sf>ecific 
purposes. But in Ireland the theory of the government was ac- 
cepted and acted upon all during the 18th century, in spite of the 
spasmodic protests of the Irish Commons :" Murray, Commercial 
Relations, 155-6. Writing on the 23nd March, 1714, Archbishop 
King, a placeman of William III, complains that "It is preposterous 
that £5.000 pension should be allowed for a nobleman, nay, a lady, 
for services that, though very obliging to the person that gave the 
pension, yet were not proper to be alleged as motive in t he grant." 
He also complains of a salary of £10 a year being attached to the 
paltry office of keeper of the records in Birmingham Tower, Duli- 
Hn Castle ; yet when King's friend. Addison, the essayist, became 
secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he was given, in addi- 
tion to that post, the keepership of the said records with the salary 
attached and pension of £500 a year concurrently with the salary! 
This was a usual arrangement under the alleged "Irish government." 
On the 6th November, 1722. King writes, "Of a truth, we never 
had nor heard of so lavish a management as this has been since his 
majesty came to the crown ; and which is vet more mischievous, 
'tis whispered that the ministry is against these exhorbitant pen- 
sions ; but they are forced to comply with the king or turn out." 
"When the king wished to give a pension to some particularly scan- 
dalous person, he granted it on the Irish establishment, well knowing 
that the Irish Parliament could do little, while the English Com- 
mons might not have allowed the funds they voted to be used for 
such purposes:" Murray. Commercial Relations. 168. On the 8th 
January, 1723, King writes that there has just been added to the 
establishment "a pension of £1,200 to the Countess of Walshing- 



ENGLAND INTERNATIONAL LAW-BREAKER 109 

ham, and one of £1,200 to the Countess of Lippic, which makes 
an addition of £14,400"; that is, including other pensions to which 
he did not so strongly object. Pensions were sometimes given to 
unnamed persons, and some to persons under fictitious names. The 
following are specimen pensions to persons having no connection 
with, or claim upon, Ireland : The Duchess of Kendal, mistress 
of George I, £3.000 a year; the Countess of Yarmouth, £4.000 
a year ; Baron Steinberg, amount not stated ; Rudolf de Spork, 
amount not stated; Herman Holbourg, £1,000 a year; the Princess 
of Hesse, £5,000 a year; the Queen Dowager of Prussia, £800 
a year; Lady Betty Waldgrave. £800 a year; M. de Verois, the 
Sardinian ambassador who had negotiated peace with France, 
£1,000 a year; Lady Kilmansegg, £750, afterward increased to 
£1,250 a year; Qiristina Shroder, £2,000 a year; the Countess 
of Belmont. £1,500 a year; Augusta Shultz, £1,200 a year; 
Frederick, Duke of Brunswick. £4,000, afterward increased to 
£6,700 a year; Lord Bathurst, £2,000 a year; the Duke of Glou- 
cester. £3,000 a year; the Duke of Cumberland, £3.000 a year; 
the Earl of Cholmondelly, £3,700 a year; the Princess Amelia, 
£1,000 a year; Princess' Augusta. £5,000 a year; Caroline Ma- 
tilda, Queen of Denmark (banished for adultery), £3,000 a year. 
The fact that all such pensions were illegal by statute law, and 
yet had to be paid in full in Irish currency (£1-1-8 Irish to. £1 
English), and that, too, without any deduction such as tax. shows 
what little protection law and a subordinate parliament offered 
to Ireland against English depredations. The revenue was not 
always relieved by a pension lapsing from death or other cause. 
The "government" in suitable cases, of which they were the judge, 
transferred the pension to some other favorite, and it became per- 
manent. \\^ithin the official circle, a pension attached to an office 
and paid concurrently with the salary^ was sometimes retained on 
the pensioner's promotion to a better post, though he either could 
not or would not discharge the duties of the pensioned office. As 
exposed by Swift in his Drapiers Letters, many of the higher of- 
fices in Church, State, and Judiciary were given with their salaries 
to Englishmen, who in some cases never came to Ireland, and 
never made, or pretended to make, any return whatever for the 
salaries. The duties were either neglected or discharged by sub- 
stitutes for whom additional salaries had to be provided. The 
entire system was indefensible. 

The rise and boldness of aim of the Volunteers in 1779, and 
their resolution at Dungannon, 1782, was the first call from the. 
colony to the Irish nation, in substance though not in words, to 
rally against the common enemy. It was answered promptly and 
generously. The Volunteers created a great opportunity for the 
parliament to reform itself and achieve national independence as 
with their help and that of the Catholics it could then have done. 



110 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

But the Parliament utterly failed to rise to the greatness of the oc- 
casion. Even Grattan and the brilliant group to which he belonged 
never rose above the essentially colonial, Protestant, and dependent 
idea. The Parliament, conscious of its false position and inherent 
corruption, was always too weak to take any strong action of its 
own volition. It acted only under pressure ; volunteer pressure 
from 1779, when the Volunteers sprang into power, until 1783; 
English pressure normally. The appalling distress throughout the 
country; the wave of national spirit generated by the Volunteers, 
by the contagious example of the American colonies, and by the 
consciousness that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity, 
enabled the Parliament to achieve some commercial freedom in 
1779, and apparent legislative liberty in 1782. During the last 
twenty years of its existence it promoted the industries of sea- 
fishing, brewing, sugar-refining, and some minor industries and 
forms of development. It made Dublin a national capital, with a 
consequent concentration there of business, fashion, and wealth. 
But the value of its benefits has been greatly overestimated. Taken 
all together, they were not at all of national magnitude. They 
withered when the Parliament was extinguished. But there is no 
reason whatever to doubt ; it would be utter childishness to doubt, 
that if the Act of Union had not been carried England would have 
destroyed each and every one of the Irish enterprises as soon as 
she saw them command a profit which she could by any means 
make her own, with as little scruple as she had done with previous 
enterprises and with as little scruple as she withdrew the partial 
liberty to which these enterprises were due ; and, the colonial par- 
liament having discarded the support of the Volunteers, would have 
concurred in England's designs. The choice of method is imma- 
terial in presence of the fact that it was England did destroy the 
industries. 

By maintaining, as it did throughout, its strictly alien, sectarian, 
and colonial character, and keeping the Irish nation outside un- 
represented, the parliament deprived itself of any valid claim to be 
called an Irish Parliament. A Parliament pretending to represent 
Ireland, and speaking in her name, while itself consisting largely 
of English placemen, excluding the Irish nation, and conducting 
itself as a fragment of a foreign nation, was consciously making 
a false pretense. It could not be national as regarded Ireland. By 
the fact of excluding the nation, it made itself anti-national ; and 
in fact and in practice it was avowedly and systematically anti- 
Irish, always a ready. tool for England's anti-Irish purposes. This 
was necessarily so ; because representing only an ascendancy mi- 
nority its activities were determined and directed by the outside 
power which it served. Such an ascendancy alwavs needs external 
power against the Nation ; and that meaning, in plain words, the sup- 
port of the enemy against the nation, it was necessarily anti-Irish. 



ENGLAND INTERNATIONAL LAW-BREAKER 111 

Throughout, it was the enemy's power it' wielded, and not power 
derived from the nation it ruled ; therefore throughout it was es- 
sentially anti-national and anti-Irish. Such was the nature it had 
inherited, and such its own pettiness and corruption, that the pres- 
sure and the very existence of the \'olunteers soon became irksome 
and embarrassing to it. So far from its having achieved the in- 
dependence of Ireland, as Grattan seems to have imagined, it hardly 
achieved a single essential of independence. It had got no control 
over the executive government. That irresponsible bilody still re- 
mained the agent of the English Privy Council and retained control 
over Ireland and Ireland's resources, including the Parliament 
itself. What a parody of independence that was. The Parliament 
became frightened at the narrow escape it had had of doing some- 
thing noble. It was dazzled by the powers the Volunteers had 
won for it — because it was unwiorthy of them. It stealthily sur- 
rendered them to England again as soon as the Volunteers were 
disbanded ; and the words written by Lord Lieutenant Carlisle in 
1781 were again true: "Every regulation or restriction which Great' 
Britain may think fit to subject herself to, and which she may 
consider as equally incumbent on Ireland, will be cheerfully adopted 
in this country, and efifectively executed by Irish law" ; without 
the consent of either the Irish pe!ople or the parliament that pre- 
tended to represent them. 

The only valid argument for the maintenance of such a leprous 
institution in the country was an argument which none of the co- 
lonial statesmen had the breadth of view or courage to use, namely, 
the possibility of curing its leprosy by self ref.orm, and then im- 
bibing manhood enough to rise to its opportunities. When the 
Volunteers attempted to insist upon its reforming itself, knowing 
that it was a constant danger otherwise, the Parliament itself was 
the obstacle. It shirked the duty because it was too r!otten for the 
task. Afterwards it made such an attempt to reform as resulted 
in increasing the power of the executive over it. Individuals, many 
of them absentees, who were patrons of pocket boroughs, chose — 
for cash paid them— "representatives" whom they t,hen got a few 
of their l^ocal dependents or hirelings to go through the farce of 
"electing," unknown to the community. Seats were bought and 
sold in the open market. There was a complete absence of civic 
virtue as well as of civic freedom. We have Grattan's own au- 
thority for saying that in 1790, under what was considered an en- 
larged constitution, the Irish nation had no representation -or voice 
whatever in the making or administration of the laws which af- 
fected them and under w^hich they had to live ; and that the number 
of placemen and pensioners whom the corrupt "government" had 
got into the docile "Parliament" equalled one-half of its efficient 
members. It rapidlv became worse in the fjollowing years. It 
shirked all its great duties. It shirked its supreme duty of declar- 



112 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

ing Ireland's Sovereign Independence when the call of the Volun- 
teers had brought to its support for that purpose the nation which 
it refused to emancipate or recognize. This was its greatest failure, 
because it disappointed the nation's hopes on the only occasion on 
which the nation took an interest in its proceedings. It shirked 
the duty of settling justly the greatest and most urgent domestic 
problem, the land system which it had forced upon the people, and 
which kept them in chronic famine and sucked the marrow out 'of 
their bones. It voted money for a navy to protect its own com- 
merce, and shirked the duty of applying the money to that purpose. 
It passed a bill giving certain relief to Irish merchants, and be- 
cause England objected to their being relieved it left the bill in 
abeyance. It maintained an army, paid English ofBcers of it, and 
shirked the duty ''of exercising any control whatever over it. It 
was the sole immediate repository of power in Ireland throughout 
the 18th century. What did it achieve during that long period? 
The degradation of a nation ; its own eternal disgrace. Will the 
most capable of its admirers answer two questions so simple that 
they should be easily answered? First, can he specify a single 
benefit conferred ui>bn the excluded Irish nation by the Protestant 
colonial Parliament during the whole of its existence? Second, can 
he specify a single act w^orthy of a legislature with its pretensions 
until the pressure of the Volunteers was applied to it in 1779? 
What is to be thought of an institution calling itself an Irish Par- 
liament of which these two questions can be asked without any pjos- 
sibility of an afifirmative answer? It needs little reasoning to 
decide whether that was an instrument of freedom or of slavery. 
Ireland's instrument or England's tool. A subordinate parliament 
which throughout its existence scourged the nation in whose name 
it dared tjo speak, and shirked all its primary and fundamental 
duties, was nothing but a disgrace and a danger to Ireland, and a 
bad imitation of an over-rated model. So bad has Ireland found 
all parliaments that have meddled with her, so diametrically dif- 
ferent from the boasts regarding parliaments, so iniquitous in them- 
selves and in their output, that many have come to hate the very 
name "parliament." We look forward to making the Feis of free 
Ireland different in name as well as in character. 

Let others tell how the Act of Union was carried. Mr. Lecky 
says, "It is a simple and unexaggerated statement of the fact, that, 
in the entire history of representative government there is no in- 
stance of corruption having been applied on so large a scale, and 
with such audacious effrontery." Mr. J. A. Fox says, "W. Fong- 
field was appointed commissioner to distribute the bribes. Castle- 
reagh considered that £1,500.000 would be the necessary sum 
for the purpose of briberv. There were eighty boroughs with 
103 borough seats in the Parliament, belonging to patrons. The 
following are amjongst the sums that were paid, many in hard 



ENGLAND INTERNATIONAL LAW-BREAKER 113 

cash, in return for a vote or votes for the Act of Union: Lord 
Downshire, £52,500; Lord Ely, £-15,000; Earl of Carrick, £14,- 
350; Lord Clanmorris, £1-1,000; Sir Hercules Langrishe. £ 13,803; 
Duke of Leinster, £13,800; Lord Lismore, £12,300; Earl of Lud- 
low, £7,500; Earlbf Shannon, £7,500; Lord Tara, £7,500; Hon. 
E. Massey, £6,850, Earl of Massareene and his three brothers, 
£3,750 each— £15,000." 

Lord Lieutenant Cornwallis, writing to the Bishop of Lichfield 
on 27th April, 1799, says, "You will easily conceive how unpleasant 
my situation must be and how little I can flatter myself with the 
hopes of obtaining any credit for myself, or of rendering any es- 
sential service f/) my country. Sincerely do I repent that I did 
not return to Bengal." Writing on the 8th June, 1799, to General 
Ross, he says, "My occupation is now of the most unpleasant 
nature, negotiating and jobbing with the most corrupt people under 
Heaven. I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such 
dirty work." 

It must be remembered that titles and offices at the public ex- 
pense were distributed as lavishly as money. What made the Act 
sjo expensive was that all the free opinion of the country, North 
and South, was opposed to it. The "government" sent out urgent 
whips in all directions to obtain signatures to a petition for the 
Union. Those opposed to the Union were thwarted in every way 
in which a government can thwart popular action. Notwithstand- 
ing this, the signature of electors in County Down numbered 
17,000 against the Union and only 415 for it. Thus the colonists 
having completed the work which England w^anted them to do for 
her, would not be permitted to have a parliament for their !own 
puposes, especially in view of the danger of their becoming amal- 
gamated with the Irish nation. "Scarcely any element or aggra- 
vation of political immorality was wanting, and the term "honour," 
if it be applied to such men as Castlereagh and Pitt, ceases to have 
any real meaning in politics. Whatever may be thought lof the ab- 
stract merits of the arrangement, the LInion as it was carried was 
a crime of the deepest turpitude :" Lecky, Leaders of Public 
Opinion in Ireland, p. 198. 

In all that vile business, so loathsome to touch, the Catholics — 
that is the Irish nation at the time — had no part or responsibility, 
for the reason that v[o Catholic was eligible to or a member of 
the Colonial Parliament. The government, however, in their anxiety 
to have the measure enacted, sought help from all quarters. The 
Viceroy himself and other government agents assured the heads 
of the Catholic Church that if they gave whatever support they 
could from outside to the measure, or sbjowed they were in favor 
of it, and it was enacted, the British Parliament would immediately 
enact thie relaxation of the Penal Laws called Catholic Emancipa- 
tion; and Cornwallis told the Parliament itself that it would never 



114 . IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

grant Catholic Emancipation, because it could not afford to dio so! 
What a humiHating final kick to the Parliament that had served 
England so basely, to be told that its evil use was at an end and 
that it could not afford to do good. 

Emancipation never came as a result of the promises. Twenty- 
nine years later, the Duke Jof Wellington, then Prime Minister of 
England, informed the King that a situation had arisen in Ireland 
in which a choice had to be made between Catholic Emancipation 
and revolution. The relief then came, not because of the promises, 
nor because it was just, but as usual in obedience to the appearance 
of force. 

The Union deprived Ireland of even the simulacrum of a Par- 
liament and substituted direct legislation frfom London. The dif- 
ference to the Irish nation was, that a Parliament in Ireland, 
claiming to represent and act for Ireland only, however unrepre- 
sentative or bad, should at some time come under the control of 
the Irish nation, with the natural consequences. England knowing 
that, would on no accbunt have permitted such a Parliament to 
exist. It was vitiated throughout by the undeniable principle that 
what England had given England was entitled to take away when 
she had the power. She had no business for a Parliament in Ire- 
land but to keep the population divided, the more easily to domi- 
nate the whole. The first symptom of a better purpose was like 
a signal to England t'o take the work of dividing and dominating 
into her own hands. So long as a vestige of England's power lasts 
in Ireland, direct or indirect, its functions will be to Divide, Domi- 
nate, Plunder, Misrule, and Malign Ireland. 

Throughout almost the whole of the 10th century, the energies 
of the Irish people were so much absorbed in the sheer animal 
prbblem of self-preservation and destruction of the system of land- 
lordism imposed upon them by Cromwell and the other confis- 
cators, that it was only spasmodically, in 1848 and 1867, any ef- 
forts were made towards national independence. Owing to the 
nature of their pressing grievances, and the necessity disarmed 
men were under of utilizing any available means, they allowed 
themselves to be misled into the temporary aberration bf sending 
to the British Parliament, from 1830 onward, representatives who, 
so far as they were nationalists, treated the oath of allegiance 
as what it is — a political instrument. Their purpose there was 
chiefly to secure the enactment of land laws essential for the main- 
tenance of life, which were in each instance substantially achieved 
by popular action and the sacrifice jof many victims to prison and 
gallows. The technical breach of principle, as in the present use 
of an English-created franchise for independent purposes, was a 
legitimate tactical experiment. Having proved wholly mistaken 
and futile as a policy, it has ended, and our nation denies any right 
in the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland. 



ENGLAND INTERNATIONAL LAW-BREAKER 115 

Naturally, in two adjacent islands, before they have fully spe- 
cialized, some industries and trades suitable for one are suitable 
for both. With friendship, justice, and ,^ood sense it would be 
easy to ascertain the respective degrees of suitability, and to settle 
which should practise one set of industries and which another set. 
The English Government in dealing- with Ireland has never been 
satisfied with less than a monopoly of all, and, so far as they could 
prevent it, would not tolerate the success of any industry or trade 
in Ireland, even in the absence of a corresponding industry in 
England. When Ireland had any raw material of value which 
happened to suit England, she was not allowed to work it herself, 
or to export it, raw or manufactured, to where she chose, but was 
compelled to sell it to England at England's price ; and this is still 
the case. On the other hand, she was actually prevented from 
importing from a foreign country a raw material for which Eng- 
land had no use but thought she might have a use in the future. 
No conceivable contrivance was omitted to fetter Irish industries 
and commerce. The instances herein given must be regarded only 
as instances in a continuous and comprehensive system covering 
the whole sphere of industrial life. In some cases the effects were 
produced by acts of the Colonial Parliament at England's bidding; 
in other cases, even while that Parliament existed, directly by the 
English or British Parliament or by Orders in Council thereunder; 
just as at present sq far as any attempt is made to found or revive 
in Ireland an industry or trade. England's motive in all this is 
immaterial to Ireland; but for the information of the Peace Con- 
gress we may attempt to elucidate it. 

No doubt the primary motive of the elaborate system of re- 
strictions and cheating was, and is, the sordid, commercial one of 
helping England's manufactures and trade by any means, moral 
or immoral, in complete disregard of honesty, decency and the 
amount of injustice and suffering thereby inflicted upon others. 
So far, this was England's attitude towards all countries. In the 
minds of Englishmen, their own and their country's selfish inter- 
ests outweigh all other considerations, and supersede law, morality 
and justice, even while they preach these virtues to other people. 
From English trade jealousy Scotland, the English plantations, 
and any country that crossed England's path suffered more or 
less ; but they were not pursued beyond the incidence of trade. 
All were enemies to the extent of being traded upon and out- 
manoeuvred as much as possible ; but the active hostility ceased 
on the definite achievement or failure of the immediate purpose. 
The treatment of Ireland was, and is, in quite a different category. 
It exhibited a degrading and brutalizing antipathv; brutalizing to 
England as is his trade to the slave-owner. Not content with 
sordid gain, nor even with securitv, she tortured wantonly. She 
exhausted human ingenuity and device against Ireland, and left 



116 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

no device unused, even when no gain could be foreseen as a possible 
result. She gives way permanently to the savage impulse of seeing 
through a criminal course once entered upon. The sleepless vig- 
ilance, the untiring ingenuity, the unremitting persistency with 
which Ireland was, and is, pursued suffers no diminution from 
time or circumstance, and can proceed only from sheer malevolence 
with no reason however base to justify it. In short, the treatment 
of Ireland is the classic example of the treatment of a victim 
country. What Dr. Lynch wrote two centuries and a half ago still 
holds true: "That time could not slacken or cool down the fiery 
ardor of this hatred, that English obstinacy should be eternal, is 
truly astonishing. Never, since the creation of the world, were 
hostile feelings so systematically kept alive for such a length of 
time in any country :" Camhrensis Evcrsus, I., 219. An apt epi- 
tome of England's policy in Ireland, written three centuries ago, 
also holds true still : "Down they go in every corner, and down 
they shall go. God willing." Blinded by wicked purpose, the Eng- 
lish have never been able to appreciate the blasphemy of represent- 
ing God as sanctioning their ungodly conduct. In relation to Ire- 
land, England added to her abnormal greed an active principle of 
malignacy and wanton hatred which men, according to their tastes, 
ascribe to racial, religious, climatic, or other causes, or to all these 
together ; but which remain historical facts, whatever be the motive. 
All these may be elements in a complex motive, especially for Eng- 
land's hatred of the Irish proper, whom she has labored to murder 
and calumniate and will therefore never forgive. But she shows 
that that guilt of hers cannot be the only element, bt her treatment 
of her Protestant colonists in Ireland, fresh from her bosom, full 
of whatever sentiment animates Englishmen in lieu of patriotism ; 
full, presumably, of pride and love and hope for the greatness of 
England, and of England, at the expense of other peoples ; even 
these her children, once having become established in Ireland, were 
no longer trusted or given fair play. She had confiscated practically 
all the property of the Irish people, and given it, with all the 
power that accompanies property, into the hands of her favorites ; 
and every high office in State, Church, and Judiciary, was occupied, 
not even by one of her colonists born in Ireland, but by newer 
and fresher men from England, Protestants, attached by every tie 
to the current English order of things and the English connection ; 
and yet England would not tolerate the prosperity of these her 
garrison and friends in Ireland ; would not allow them so much 
as to protect their own conuuerce, and solved the problem by de- 
creeing that they should have no commerce. Indeed, most of the 
commercial restrictions mentioned in this statement, after the great 
confiscations, were aimed by England mainly at her own garrison 
and supporters in Ireland. In return for having made themselves 
the tools of England's domination, they were made the first and 



ENGLAND INTERNATIONAL LAW-BREAKER 117 

chief sufferers from England's insatiable greed, and were treated 
by their employers as receivers of stolen goods. When in the time 
of Charles II., the sea was infested with pirates, and the Colonial 
Parliament voted a perpetual grant for the support of a navy to 
protect their commerce, England would not permit the money to 
be so applied ; misappropriated it ; and took pains to make it known 
that any suggestion of an Irish navy would be regarded as treason- 
able. A fine illustration of confidence in her offspring, and an 
exhibition of consciousness that she was not treating that offspring 
justly. She conipelled her Irish Parliament to contribute £3C,000 
a year (equal to nearly ten times as much now), when Ireland 
could ill afford it, towards English shipping, and £62,000 in addi- 
tion towards the maintenance of Tangier. Ireland must defend 
Tangier but dare not defend itself. The Irish nation, as distinct 
from the colony, unconscious of having given any cause for Eng- 
land's implacable hatred, and seeing no cause for it but the well- 
known one, that a criminal rarely forgives his victim, generally 
attribute it to a malignant nature or a disease. The real motive 
of the hatred, however, is this : The English commercial rnind 
is incapable of conceiving power as other than a product and ac- 
companiment of wealth, as it has been in England's case. She 
knows well, better than the Irish themselves know, the natural 
wealth, actual and latent, of Ireland. It was not the poverty, but 
""the wealth of Ireland, that attracted English advelnturers and ex- 
cited their cupidity and jealousy. The more favored a country 
is by nature the more attractive to the covetous — and the greater 
the crime of destroying it. As a murderer dislikes being confronted 
by a person who has escaped his knife, so England in her guilt, 
dislikes the nation towards which she stands in the position of 
murderer and especially dislikes being confronted by that nation 
before an international tribunal. Having partially failed to ex- 
terminate the Irish nation, the English statesmen and press con- 
stantly disseminate the slander in foreign countries that Ireland 
could not support herself as a separate State, knowing from their 
own experience that it is a slander. They have, as we have seen, 
long since found Ireland to be a natural mine of wealth, and have 
abstracted and appropriated to themselves more from it for years 
than is expended in maintaining some proud States in Europe. 
That explains why England is so wealthy, and Ireland so appar- 
ently poor, because impoverished by England's extortion. England 
knows that an independent Irish State would rapidly become wealthy 
and powerful in modern Europe. Therefore the true and only cure 
for England's malignancy is the destruction of her power in Ire- 
land. It is knowledge of this and not counterhate, which has been 
forced upon us by unvarying experience as our motive and our 
only safety. The partial and temporary revival of Irish industries 
from 1779 till 1800 was limited to the scope and duration of the 



118 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

instalment of liberty of that period. With sovereign independence 
alone is a nation limited only by her ability and virtue, and enabled 
to put forth her best efforts and reap the reward. 

An international Peace Congress, one of whose purposes is to 
establish a durable peace among nations, cannot fail to take ac- 
count of the chief dispositions and forces hostile to peace, and to 
take effective precautions against future misconduct of any State 
addicted to indulge in such misconduct. There is special necessity 
for this in the case of a State which has indulged in any grave 
species of misconduct toward a subject nation by continuous policy, 
as distinguished from severity arising out of specific cause ; has 
practiced such a policy to the degree of treating the subject nation 
as a victim ; and holds its conduct to be an exclusively domestic 
concern. International law does not recognize, and civilized states 
cannot afford to allow, that any State has or can have or acquire 
a right to torture and destroy a subject nation. Not even in war, 
still less as a settled form of government, can such treatment be 
allowed. France, England, Russie and America have already in 
several instances, with universal approval, treated such abuse of 
power as tyranny, a breach of international law, a public danger, 
and a forfeiture by the offending State of any right to rule such 
subject nation ; released the nations from such subjection, and es- 
tablished and maintained their independence. In none of those 
instances, in no case of which there is record, has abuse of power 
been so bad or so long continued, as in the treatment of Ireland 
by England, comprising as it does : 

1. The policy of defamation of Irish character, still being pursued ; 

2. The policy of destruction of civilization in Ireland, still being pur- 
sued; 

3. The policy of extcrmmating the Irish nation, still being pursued; 

4. The policy of destruction and prevention of Irish industries and 
trade, still being pursued; 

5. The policy of prevention of legitimate intercourse u'ith other nations, 
still being pursued ; 

6. The policy of financial exhaustion of Ireland for England's pur- 
poses, still being pursued ; 

7. The policy of infidelity to public engagements with Ireland, still 
being pursued; 

8. The policy of general victimization of Ireland, still being pursued ; 

9. The policy of infringing the international Convention of The Hague, 
1907, still being pursued ; and 

10. The policy of dominating international commerce, still being pur- 
sued. 

Therefore we have to add to Ireland's numerous irresistible titles 
to sovereign independence the right of release from a tyranny 



ENGLAND INTERNATIONAL LAW-BREAKER 119 

which international law and all civilized states condemn, which no 
right of sovereignty, and no duty of allegiance could survive. Eng- 
land having made herself the personification of iniquity, must be 
relieved of position and power so selfishly abused. 



XIV. 

Ireland Claims Recognition and Intervention by the Peace 

Congress, Restitution and Reparation by England, 

and an International Guarantee for 

Her Future Security. 

Every nation that is not wholly absorbed in animal grossness 
has a spiritual personahty; and its own past, when worthy, is the 
surest foundation of its claim for restoration and recognition as a 
State, and for its future when restored. Basing upon all the fore- 
going general and special titles and grounds of claim of a nation 
old in, centuries but replete with the generous hope and high pur- 
pose of youth ; scornfully rejecting the suggestion that she is des- 
tined always to be the slave and drudge of an inferior people ; 
animated by the indomitable spirit and courage of self-sacrifice to 
proceed, in any event, to the goal of independence ; Ireland appeals 
specially to every state that respects the virtues and qualities es- 
sential to civilization, that inherits gratitude to Ireland for any past 
service, or that cares for the permament interests of justice and 
peace. She appeals to the Peace Congress as a whole on all these 
grounds to receive and hear her represntatives ; and deal worthily 
with the case they present for restoration to the society of Sov- 
ereign States of one which in her long career never inflicted wrong 
upon any nation. It behooves the Congress as well as Ireland to 
remember England's desire to stifle our voice, stronger today than 
in 1599, when Queen Elizabeth's Deputy, Lord Essex, said : 
" Twere as well for our credit that we alone had the exposition 
of our quarrel with this people, and not they also." 

No question of the identity of the Irish nation can honestly be 
raised. But knowing our opponent, we desire to forestall a pos- 
sible allegation that the Irish nation of today is not identical with 
that of the independent Ireland of the past; and we invite the 
Congress : 

1. To require the State challenging Ireland in this respect to produce, 
as a "condition of being heard on that subject, a verification of ks 
own identity with the England of the centuries of Ireland's in- 
dependence. 

2. To consider whether any other European State of the present day 
is identical with its own past in so many essential respects as Ire- 
land is with hers ; and 

3. To consider the following statement on historical identity by the 
English constitutional lawyer, Phillimore : 

"The vital principle of international law is a necessary and prin- 
120 



INTERNATIONAL GUARANTEE 121 

cipal consequence flowing from the doctrine of moral personality and 
actual intercommunion of States. The legion, the Roman jurist said, 
is the same, though the members of it are changed ; the ship is the 
same, though the planks of it are renewed ; the individual is the same, 
though the particles of his body may not be the same in his youth as 
in his old age; and so 'Popitlum euiidcvi hoc tempore piitari qui abhine 
ccntiiin ainiis fuisset!'" 

The Entente Allies and all who have expressed concurrence in 
their war aims have, in accordance with a principle of international 
law universally recognized, specially emohasized the equality of 
right among nations, whether big or little, in all matters, but es- 
pecially for the purpose of determining the rule under which they 
would live. In a Federal State, such as North America and 
Switzerland, the constituent states have equal representation in 
the Federal Senate, irrespective of their size or population. The 
principle of international law to which this conforms is thus ex- 
pressed by Oppenheim: "Since the law of nations is based on the 
common consent of the States as Sovereign communities, the 
member-states of the family of nations are equal to each other 
as subjects of international law," irrespective of any difference 
among them as regards area, population, power, etc. "This is 
a consequence of their sovereignty and of the fact that the law of 
nations is a law between, not above states." Sir F. E. Smith, At- 
torney General of England, in his book on the subject, thus ex- 
presses it: "States are units of international law, and that law 
recognizes mutual equality among them." Therefore President 
Wilson's declaration of equality of right among nations, big and 
little, adopted by the Allies, is but a re-afifirmation of a principle 
long established, and its application to subtnerged nations equally 
with those that are independent. In accordance with this principle. 
Ireland claims in the Peace Congress equal representation with 
that of other nations to be affected by the decisions of the Congress. 
Her claim for recognition of her status as a Sovereign State is, 
and has been shown in this statement to be, so well founded that 
she believes herself entitled to enforce it whenever and however 
she can. She desires to avail of this Congress as one of the possible 
methods. Her claim may be regarded from either of two stand- 
points : that of Ireland claiming a measure of simple justice due 
to her historically, due to her merits, her inherent right, essential 
to her continued existence, which she is qualified and able to as- 
sume with safety and credit, and which she is for all these reasons 
determined to have ; and from the standpoint of the Congress, either 
allowing the claim and thus settling an inveterate dispute, or taking 
the responsibility of refusine recognition. The former course would 
put the Congress in possession of the facts and merits of the case. 
The latter course would amount to an adverse decision in disre- 
gard of the facts and merits; which facts and merits the civilized 
world could not then be restrained from discussing and deciding 



122 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

upon, in derogation of the functions and repute of the Congress. 
Any proposal to recognize the status quo ante helium would produce 
the same result, with the addition that, irrespective of facts and 
merits, the Congress would in effect take the side of power and 
oppression against unquestionable right, justice, and humanity, and 
thus begin its proceedings by recognizing and maintaining that 
very dominance of Force over Right which it is earnestly hoped 
the Congress will eliminate from the world. In the actual case, 
this would amount to a declaration that there is no remedy for an 
international wrong involving the existence of a nation. In addi- 
tion to the retrograde step which such a confession of failure to 
meet a supreme need would undoubtedly be, it is worth consider- 
ing the untenable position into which it would lead the Congress 
in a conceivable case. The two nations of Sweden and Norway 
constituted one State until eleven years ago, when they separated 
without loss of human life. Norway's right to separation, in- 
dependence, and international recognition was not then and is not 
now questioned by other States. Norway is now regarded as 
rightly in possession of her independence. Taking the facts as 
they were at the time of the separation, and laying aside the ques- 
tion of relative power, could forcible opposition by Sweden have 
diminished or destroyed, in international law, Norway's right to 
independence ? Clearly it could not : the right was inherent. Nor- 
way's right, 'nowj internationally recognized, would have been 
equally good even had she been unable to achieve independence. 
Neither her weakness nor Sweden's strength would have affected 
the right as a right. Therefore we ask the Congress to recognize 
that Ireland's right is equally good as Norway's. Again, though 
Austria and Hungary now constitute a single State, internationally 
recognized as one, the countries composing that State are free to 
separate. If they, or either of them, or any one of other united 
countries, desired separation, the mere fact of another member 
of the group opposing and by force defeating the project of 
separation, could neither diminish the right nor justify other na- 
tions, singly or collectively, in attempting to prevent the separa- 
tion by refusing to recognize as a separate State the country de- 
siring it. This being so even in the case of countries united 
constitutionally by mutual agreement and nearly equal in power, 
where spectator nations may intervene or remain passive ; it is 
much more emphatically so, and imposes a positive duty of inter- 
vention, where, as in the case of Ireland, the right to independence 
exists, where there has never been any agreed union or constitu- 
tional connection, where the only union is that of force ; more 
accurately, where there is no union, but only subjection and sub- 
jection for the purposes of the strong at the expense of the weak. 
In this case, a refusal to recognize the right of the subject nation 
to sovereign status would be a refusal to remedy a supreme inter- 



INTERNATIONAL GUARANTEE 123 

national wrong, a strengthening of the chains of slavery, and would 
be more repugnant to international law, to justice, and to interna- 
tional interest than would a refusal to recognize Norway in one of 
the cases submitted, or Hungary in the other. 

The American statesman, John Quincy Adams, writing to Presi- 
dent Monroe, said: "There is a stage in such (revolutionary) 
contests when the party struggling for independence has, as I 
conceive, a right to demand its acknowledgment by neutral parties, 
and when the acknowledgment may be granted without departure 
from the obligations of neutrality." It will be observed that he 
does not restrict the principle to nations with a historical claim, 
but makes it applicable to all alike. As illustrations, it is to this 
principle that America owed recognition of herself by France in 
1778; and to the continued pressure of her arms, helped by France's 
recognition, she owed the recognition of her independence by Eng- 
land four years later. When in 1G40 the King of Spain (to which 
Portugal was then subject) ordered a large number of troops to 
be conscripted in Portugal for Spanish service, for the purpose of 
fighting Spain's battles and diminishing Portugal's power of revolt, 
the Portuguese perceiving the two-fold object, broke out in revolt, 
which was successful in overthrowing the Spanish yoke ; made 
John, Duke of ^raganza, King of Portugal ; and John's ambassa- 
dors were received at the Courts of France, England and Sweden, 
and subsequently by Spain herself. So the independence of 
Switzerland was formally recognized in 1648 and 1654; and of 
Holland by Spain in 1649. It is to the same principle the Balkan 
States owe recognition of them by European States, followed by 
one form or another of intervention, and their consequent inde- 
pendence and separation from Turkey. The independence of the 
countries overrun by Napoleon was recognized by France in 1815; 
of the South American Republics by England in 1825, before their 
independence had been recognized by their mother country ; of 
Greece, after her unsuccessful insurrection, by France, Great Britain 
and Russia in 1827 ; of Belgium by France. England, Russia, Prussia 
and Austria in 1855; of united Italy in 1860; of Norway in 1907, 
and of several old and also several new States during the progress 
of the Great War. It is to the practice of recognition, followed 
by intervention where necessary, the existence anywhere today of 
national independence and of human liberty is due ; and doubtless 
prevention of many wars. Hence we urge it at present in the case 
of Ireland. 

Intervention, when rendered necessary by obstinate tyranny, is 
a logical development of recognition ; and is, under international 
law, a .duty incumbent upon States, in order to stay the shedding 
of blood ; to prevent greater evils than even a wrong intervention 
could possibly be ; to prevent or stop gross injustice to a nation 
and inhumanity to a people ; a fortiori, to prevent the destruction 



124 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

of a nation ; and to prevent misrule calculated to produce constant 
injustice and disturbance. In modern times, France, England, 
Russia, and America have, expressly in the interest of justice and 
humanity, constituted themselves the special champions of certain 
submerged and oppressed nations not within their own dominions, 
and in that character have recognized new and revived States and 
intervened to establish their independence. Submergence and op- 
pression are the fundamental grounds of their action. It is because 
all the evils of submergence and oppression are united in a virulent 
form in the present condition of Ireland, that immediate joint recog- 
nition and intervention on her behalf are claimed. If it be true, as 
some allege, that the people of a country, as distinguished from its 
rulers, never deliberately oppress or work for the destruction of 
another people, and thnt of such crimes rulers and governments 
alone are guilty ; it would follow that suppression, oppression and 
the policy of exterminating the Irish nation never had English 
popular sanction. On the evidence of history we hold the English 
people guilty of all they have enabled their rulers to do in Ireland. 
But either way, the surest foundation for peace is the separate 
independence of each nation — self-determination. It is only by such 
international polity mankind can become enriched with the best 
contribution that each nation is capable of making to the common 
stock of civilization and progress, and that a just international law 
can spring. Precedents invoked from the past for the subjugation 
of nations are not international law, but inter-tyrant perversions 
of law and justice, and havt never had tht considered approval 
of any free people or of any international Peace Congress elected 
by free peoples. They are essentially antagonistic to peace and 
harmony among nations. It is in the nature of things, insisted 
upon by the United States of America, and acknowledged by that 
country's present Allies, an essential condition of an enduring peace 
that no nation be kept against its will under the control of another 
nation. A State imposing such control on an unwilling nation, and 
thus violating an essential condition of an enduring peace, thereby, 
in addition to any other disqualifying fact, shows itself to be un- 
worthy of representation in an international Congress whose pri- 
mary purpose is to establish an enduring peace. As on all other 
points, so on this point the condition Ireland demands as essential 
to an enduring peace is precisely the condition laid down by the 
Entente Powers, if not by the belligerents on both sides. We accept, 
without alteration, the various dicta of the Allied statesmen when 
they hastened to adopt as their own President Wilson's declaration 
on this point. They thus arrived at what amounts to an unanimous 
declaration of independence for oppressed nations desiring to be 
free ; wrenched them from the category of domestic problems in 
which tyrants strive to keep them, and made them urgent matter of 
international law, Poland being expressly named by Mr. Wilson 



INTERNATIONAL GUARANTEE 125 

as an example of such a nation. If intensity and duration of op- 
pression determine the degree of urgency in applying this sover- 
eign remedy, the claim of Poland for independence, sufficient though 
it is, is neither so strong nor so urgent as the claim of Ireland. Air. 
Wilson may have named Poland as a moderate example, and 
omitted Ireland as being an extreme example of the oppression 
that justifies international intervention to re-establish the inde- 
pendence of the nation oppressed. A very brief comparison of Ire- 
land's case with that of Poland will prevent the drawing of any 
unwarranted inference from the mention of Poland and the omis- 
sion of Ireland. If Poland is entitled to independence though, 
while nationally submerged, no sustained policy of deliberate brutal- 
ization was pursued against her people, and they were not deprived 
of their property, their religion, their civilization, their language, 
their literature, their education, their national and local institutions, 
their national characteristics, the web and woof of their society, 
their history, their knowledge of what their nation had been, and 
was prevented from being; then Ireland, against whose people all 
these outrages have been systematically committed, must be a 
stronger and more urgent claimant for independence. If Poland 
is entitled to independence, though, while nationally submerged, 
the State submerging her has not calumniated the character of her 
people in other countries, and has not prevented them making their 
condition and aspirations known among the nations ; then it follows 
from England having done these things to Ireland, and still con- 
tinuing to do them, that Ireland's claim to independence is stronger 
and more urgent that that of Poland. If Poland is entitled to 
independence though, while nationally submerged, she has prospered 
economically. Ireland, which, while submerged, has, by design and 
contrivance of her oppressor, decayed economically, has obviously 
suffered greater oppression, and is therefore more strongly entitled 
and in more urgent need of independence. If the well-known pros- 
perity of Poland under foreign rule does not weaken her claim to 
national independence, the decay of Ireland in consequence of for- 
eign rule must strengthen her claim. If Poland is entitled to inde- 
pendence though, while nationally submerged, her trade and indus- 
tries flourished, Ireland, in which, while submerged, trade and in- 
dustries have been deliberately strangled and destroyed, as we have 
seen, in the interests of England, has a stronger right and a more 
urgent claim to independence. If Poland is entitled to independ- 
ence though, while nationally submerged, her population has dou' 
bled, it follows that the English policy of exterminating the Irish 
nation, of which the reduction to one-half within the last seventy 
years of direct English rule is the latest evidence, makes independ- 
ence, while important for Poland, vital for Ireland. If Poland is 
entitled to independence though her national submergence has been 
materially beneficial to her, on what grounds could national inde- 



126 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

pendence be withheld from Ireland to whom subjection is destructive 
to the point of extinction? If Poland is entitled to independence 
because nationally submerged and oppressed for little more than a 
century, it follows that Ireland's claim must be stronger and more 
urgent, she having been much more tyrannically oppressed for four 
times that period. Ireland's claim is in strict accordance with 
President Wilson's idea, adopted by the Allies, that foreign rule 
is the comprehensive evil comprising every other; that whether it 
be in some cases more or less good in detail is a secondary consid- 
eration ; and it is in that sense, and to emphasize the urgency, we 
bring any details under review. 

On all of the grounds submitted, Ireland now claims 

SOVEREIGN INDEPENDENCE 

comprising the rights and powers 

Of designing, framing, and establishing an Irish national 
constitution ; 

Of territorial inviolability, including islands and territorial 
waters as internationally recognized ; 

Of self-preservation by prevention of, defense against, and 
resistance to, economic or military hostility, war or peace, 
as self-preservation may demand ; 

Of free development of national resources by internal ac- 
tion, and by commerce, treaties, and relations with other 
States ; 

Of absolute control and jurisdiction over all persons, things 
and rights within Ireland and its islands and territorial 
waters ; 

Of protection of her lawful citizens wherever situated; and 

Of recognition of her government and her flag, and the ex- 
ternal marks of honor and respect. 

Ireland's subsidiary claims, for restitution of money unjustly 
and tryrannically abstracted and for reparation of wilful damage 
wantonly inflicted, like the claims of other countries after a pro- 
longed and devastating struggle, now await settlement, in accord- 
ance with international law and justice as applied to the ascer- 
tained facts. Such a settlement being regarded as just between 
nations that have been engaged in mutual war, under the laws of 
civilized warfare, is more essentially just between nations, one of 
which, fully armed, makes upon the other, which it has disarmed, 
continual uncivilized war in what the dominant nation calls a time 
of peace, and treats the other as a victim nation by plunder, ex- 
tirpation, wilful destruction of her institutions, industries and trade; 



INTERNATIONAL GUARANTEE 127 

wilful neglect of her material development after having stripped her 
of means of self-help, and with consequent decay and diminution 
of population. On the financial part of our subsidiary claim no 
doubt or difficulty can arise, because, as shown in the section dealing 
with that subject, the amount has been ascertained by British finan- 
cial experts, namely, the excessive taxation of Ireland since 1800 — 
£400,000,000. The other material damage, direct and consequen- 
tial, is only partially reparable, because the past cannot be recalled. 
As it is obviously much larger than the taxes, justice entitles Ire- 
land to a much larger sum in respect of it ; and no nation or as- 
sembly of nations can require Ireland to be satisfied with less than 
justice. But if it should contribute to the world's peace, Ireland 
would, in consideration of an international guarantee for her future 
security, accept very much less. The only way in which the damage 
can be even partially repaired is by Ireland herself undertaking the 
task of reconstruction and working to recover and properly protect 
her due position in the modern world of which England has de- 
prived her. To do this within reasonable time will require an im- 
mediate expenditure of a very large sum of money. This being 
the consequence of England's treatment of Ireland, England has 
no defense whatever against the claim, and must consider herself 
extremely well treated if Ireland accept from her what is abso- 
lutely essential for the purpose. In these circumstances what we 
claim, and ask international support in obtaining, is such a reduced 
sum as will enable us to begin at once the great and urgent task of 
reconstruction on which we are about to enter as a free people. 
The least that would enable us to do this is the £400,000,000 in 
respect of excessive taxation, plus a small fraction of what is our 
due in respect of other damage, say £100,000,000, making £500,- 
000,000 in all. With an international guarantee that Ireland's in- 
dependence will in future be respected, Ireland would accept this 
sum. 



Some light is thrown on the difficulties which workers for free- 
dom encounter, and on the cause of imperfections in this State- 
ment by the fact that all the members of a small Committee ap- 
pointed by the Sinn Fein Council to draft the Statement of Ire- 
land's case for submission to that Council are now political prison- 
ers in so many of England's separate prisons, without possibility 
of communicating with each other, or access to any library, or 
consultation for the purpose of a jomt draft, the preparation of 



128 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

any statement of the kind being tantamount to high treason: and 
all the principal members of the council being similarly in isolated 
custody. This renders the preparation of one joint and finished 
statement, and its revision by the Council, impossible. It almost 
renders the preparation of any statement impossible. The present 
Statement is probably one of a number, all prepared in isolation 
under great diiiliculties. It is hoped that, in view of these circum- 
stances, and having regard to the relevant substance rather than 
to the art of presentation, the Peace Congress will be so considerate 
as to give due weight to what is substantial and relevant, wherever 
it appears, and to accept oral explanation or elucidation from Ire- 
land's representatives in the Congress. 

Sophistries with which it may be attempted to combat Ireland's 
case, and which have to be guarded against will probably include 
some sly version of the superiority of militarist imperialism to 
nationalism. Imperialism is by its nature militarist ; so much so, 
that a League of Nations, consisting of, or dominated by, what are 
called the "Great Powers" would be in efifect a league against na- 
tions and against liberty. It would be a cruel mockery of nations 
not physically powerful, unless the full equality of nations, irre- 
spective of size, were first definitely recognized by all. As Presi- 
dent Wilson says : "The whole Family of Nations will have to 
guarantee to each nation that no nation shall violate its independence 
or its territorial integrity. That is the basis — the only conceivable 
basis — for the future peace of the world." The struggle of which 
Ireland's case is the most acute example is one between imperialism 
and nationality, between militarism and democracy. Our whole 
case, and most, if not all, of the difficult business of the Peace Con- 
gress are due to imperialism. The feeling a conglomerate empire 
engenders is neither patriotism, nor taste, nor art, nor anything ideal 
or spiritual, but dominance, power, aggression, destruction, brutal- 
ization ; an antithesis of patriotism ; a feeling that scarcely dares 
to find frank expression among enlightened people, but is pregnant 
with danger to mankind. This will probably appear in the con- 
trast between this Statement and England's objections to it. One 
objection may be that the prolonged agony for which we arraign 
England is an exclusively domestic matter, just as the slave-owners 
of the Southern States of America pleaded. If the victimization 
of a country by a government which refuses to acknowledge any 
responsibilitv to that countrv were not an international concern, 
international law would be stripped of its primary and fundamental 
function and reduced to international anarchv. Another objection 
may be that the torture is now long past. England herself refutes 
this by the argimient of facts, by maintaining permanently in Ireland 
a large Army of Occupation, martial law and other coercive laws 
in operation, the best lands unproductive in England's interest, the 
finest harbors empty in England's interest, the country decaying in 



INTERNATIONAL GUARANTEE 129 

England's interest, the population diminishing in England's interest, 
some 300 of the most loved and trusted Irish men and women living 
now locked up as political prisoners, without trial, in England's in- 
terest. While that state of tyranny, if not of war, continues, as 
now, living and active, to say that the torture is long past, or past 
at all, is to trifle with the Congress by setting empty words against 
facts. Though England has not tried those prisoners on any 
charge, she does not hesitate to tell the world that they are "felons". 
The Irish people reply by honoring them as "felons," just as the 
Saxons of England adopted "outlaw" as a title of honor under 
William the Conqueror. That being the normal condition of Ire- 
land under English rule, we submit that it is not in accordance with 
international law and the interests of peace. The agony of sub- 
jection being, then, in continuance, and England's fight being clearly 
a fight against nature, we cannot believe that the Congress will 
tacitly concur in the prolongation, of the unnatural and blighting 
connection of the two countries. Small nations have, on the fore- 
going and on many other grounds, a stronger claim than empires 
upon a body administering international law. They naturally re- 
spect the law because it is law, and because they are unable to de- 
fend themselves without it. On the other hand, they have more 
endurance than conglomerate empires, because they draw their 
vitality from a natural, not an artificial source. Their career also 
is oftentimes more distinguished. Civilization, religion, philosophy, 
arts, sciences, refinements, things of mind and heart and taste have 
had their origin and home in small States rather than in great 
empires. Imperial tyranny may succeed in crushing a small nation 
out of existence, and that result may be agreeable to the imperial- 
ist. It is, none the less, an international crime, and a distinct loss 
to the sweetness and amenity of life, and may be so felt for ages 
after. It is a savage joy, that of crushing a people superior to the 
crusher in all respects save that of power. Apart from religion, 
one's own nation furnishes the purest and most elevating object 
of love and service, a perennial joy, a radiant, graceful and benefi- 
cent presence, a genial friend who never grows stale, upon whom 
love and service are never wasted — least of all wasted when the 
imperialist provides a gibbet as their reward. For the outcome of 
imperialism we have only to look at the war-torn world, and realize 
how much love and gratitude we owe to our own small nation that 
has proved herself possessed of the highest form of greatness by 
preserving her spiritual individuality, by filling her children with 
ambitions essentially healing, which when successful are so many 
blessings, and when unsuccessful leave no trace oi harm or asperity. 
The war has shown that there is a powerful spirit of evil abroad. 
Ireland, in spite of her modern history, teaches us that there is also 
a spirit of good, if not abroad, at least in existence and available 
to the worthy. If, as we know, some of the minutest things in 



130 IRELAND'S CASE FOR FREEDOM 

nature contribute towards universal beauty, and even towards utib'ty 
as well; if, as we know, benefits have flown to mankind from the 
unsubstantial sentiment of patriotism; if, as we know, England with 
all its imperial power has failed to extinguish that sentiment in 
Ireland, it may be pardonable presumption on our part to hope 
that through the gracious and just recognition of the sovereign 
status of Ireland by this International Peace Congress, we Irish 
may be helpful towards attaining and securing that era of peace 
which the world so much needs and releasing the Spirit of Good 
for the happiness of all. 

Written and now finished in this cell in Mount joy Prison, Dublin, 
15th July, 1918, by 

Laurence Ginnell, 
Barrister of the Middle Temple and Irish 
Bar, M. P. for North Westmeath, Joint 
Treasurer for Sinn Fein, Member of 
the Committee for the Drafting of Ire- 
land's Case. 



INDEX 



Absentee Tax 

Adams. John Quincy 

Addison 

Armagh, University of 

Aptitude for Industries 

Arms, Claim Arising from. 
Art, Textile 



. .123 
. .108 
.4, 26 



Bagdad. Proclamation at 

Beaumont, Gustave de 

Bede, Venerable 

Brehon Laws !.'/„'* 

x,.;k«.v 45. 46, 112. et 



British Liberty ^^ 

Bruce. Edward ;V'7i"7V 99 

Burke. Edmund 23, 71, H, 



Campbell, Wm 

Carew, Sir George 

Carlisle, Lord Lieutenant 

Cattle Trade 

Cecil. Lord Robert 

Charles the Bald 

Charles I 

Charles II 

Charlemagne 

Citizen Army 

Civilization 

Clonmacnoise 

Colonial Parliament 

Columbanus 

Confiscation 



.64, 67 
...42 
...Ul 

... 58 



27 

■ ' 45 

v.. 49, 62 

26 

_[[ 93 

17, 25, 90, 96, 97 

26 

"V.V 63, 64 

'.'.".' 27 

39, et seq. 

Connaught, Composition of 43 

Constitutional title 2, 118 

Continuity of English Policy 2, 118 

Constance, Council of ^^'^o'! 

Cornwallis, Lord 

Cosby 

Corruption 

Cotton Industry 

Crommelin 

Cromwell 



41 

109, et sea. 

67 

65 

46 



Defamation, Policy of 33, 120 

Davis. Thomas ^^^ 

Disraeli (Beaconsfield) ^3 

Divide and Rule 5. 6, 80 

Duff erin, Lord 



.105 



Elizabeth 20, 36. 51 

England's Infidelity 14 

England's Sinister Silence 101 

England's Unfitnesi 8. 103 



Page 

Essex, Earl of 121 

Eriugena ^7, 28 

Extermination, Policy of... 3, 38, et seq. 

Famine, State-Created ....51, 54, 55, 56 

Financial Relations '^ 

Financial Strength 4, 71 

Fitness of Ireland 5, 76 

Fox, J. A 112 

Freedom of the Seas 7, 99 

Fronde. James Anthony .. .42, 51, 62, 106 

(Jaelic Polity 1' 

Gall, St II 

Genesis of This Statement 127, 128 

Glass Manufacture ^"^ 

Oodkin *4- tl 

Green, Mrs J'' 

Grotius 24, 101. 102 

Hague Convention 15- 93 

Hamburg- Amerika Company 69 

lOfa 

^""''"'^^ .28 

^^'^'■"^" .'.■.20. 38 

S:n:y^an.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.19.20.38 

Historical Title 1' 1^ 

Hollinshed 

120 

Identity 

Independence Defined ^' ^ ' ,, 

inherent Title 2, 32 

Insurrection, Right of -iVn 

Intervention ; ' ' ' " 

Ireland's Claim 9. 10. 126. ^27 

Ireland Equipped ^' ' 

Ireland's Purposes „',., 

isolation of Ireland 7. 8, 99. 100. 101 

22, 44 

•^'^"^^^ 1 22 

James II 

Kilkenny, Statute of ^^ 

Kilkenny, Confederation of ^^ 

King. Bishop of Derry i"» 

Kinsale. Battle of 

Lavelle, Father , „ 

Lecky 52,60,63.106,112,1 

Linen Industry V'ifi'2V 24 

Loyalty to Ireland L 16- f- 24 

Loyalty, Mercenary li^- ^| 

Lynch, Dr. John 29. no 



INDEX- 

IMacaulpy, I>ord 77 

Manpower 3, 3n, r.7 

Mill, John Stuart 69 

Mltchel, John 55 

Moryson, Fynos 42 

Mullaghniast, Massacre of 41 

Murray, Mlss 105 

National Identity 12o 

Norsemen 16 

Norway 122 

O'Mboro, rioffer 22 

O'Mooros. Massacre of 40, 41 

O'Neill, Donal ..." ].j 

O'Neill, Hugh 21 

O'Neill, Owen Roe 21 

O'Neill, Sean 20, 40 

O'Neill. Daunt 74 

Oppenhciiii joj 

Parllainont, A Subordinate 

103, et seq., 117 

Peace ConRross 1, n 

Pensions 108. 109 

Porrot, Sir John 4;), 4,; 

Phlllimore .121 

Plantation of Ulster 44 

I'"'«n<l 124. 125. 12G 

Population 3, 38. et s<(|., 57 

Portugal ] 28 

Prondergast 48 

Provision Trade 59 

Purposes. Ireland's 7, 05 

Recognition 9, 91. 120, 123 

Renunciation Act 104 

Restitution, Amount of 12. 127 

Rousselot 2S 

Russell, Lord John 55 



-Continued 

Page 

Sons. Freedom of 7^ 99 

Self-Preservatlon q[ 82 

Slavery. Sold Into ..." 49 

Sovereign Independence ;i, um; 

Spenser. Herbert ;;« 

Spenser, Edmund .-jo, 42 

Strafford 21.' 45 

Stuarts ......" ' 21 

Sullivan. A. M 55 

Swift. Dean . .... .2:!, 109 

Sydney, Sir ITcnry '. 40 

Tangier j j 7 

J'»^i^tion 7]_ et'seq. 

"Times" Newspaper 54 57 

'rithes .'.';r,9.' 60 

Tolerance of Irish ]06 

Thierry. Augustine 2«. 79 

Tone. Theobald Wolfe 23. 96 

'''"<""■« 30. 36 

Unfitness of England to Rule Ireland.. 

" S, 103 

Unntnes.s of England to Adjudicate on 

''■'•"'■"•"l 12, 13. 14, 15 

>'"i"". Act of ,12. ,n seq. 

\'ero. Aubrey de ^9 

Victim Country 5,; 

Vl'^toria 56 

Volunteers of 18th Century 79 

Volunteers of 20th Century 93 

William of Orange 23. 50, 62. 65 

Wilson. President 121, 126 

Woolen Industry 61 

Young. ArMiur 57 

Ziinmer, Ileinrich 28 



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